Posts by Jeff Terrell

In participation with Level The Playing Field, I’ll be teaching a series of workshops on React Native in the Virtual App Lab.

For reference, here is how we in the App Lab recommend installing Clojure. The official guide works great for MacOS and Linux users, but it currently has some confusing aspects for Windows users that are worth clarifying.

A few days ago, with the help of my TA, Srihari Pratapa, I gave a tutorial on using Figma for UI design to my COMP 523 class.

I recently discovered the UNC Design Lab and thought others should know about it.

I just uploaded a video showing how to create a fork and a pull request in GitHub. This is a little more complicated than pull requests within the same repository because a repository owned by somebody else typically doesn’t allow you to push commits directly to it. Check out the 9-minute video, or read on for details.

Last semester, I invited students (especially art students) to submit an idea for a mural, to make the App Lab feel a little more colorful. In the end, I was most impressed with Henderson Beck, who helped me get a mural completed and posted on the wall. This post tells that story and includes links to pictures, source code, and even a video of the mural.

A few days ago, I gave a talk to participants of the 2019 UNC Makeathon about how to create a backend web service.

This morning I gave a lecture about git to my COMP 523 (software engineering laboratory) class. (Update 2019-10-03: I just published a video tutorial of the same content.) Some know it well; others barely know what it is. Here are a few resources I’ve collected on learning git, with some notes about how appropriate they are to beginners vs. more experienced people.

A couple of days ago, I gave a lecture to COMP 523 (software engineering laboratory) about Redux.js. I developed a simple example based on the (perhaps familiar) tic-tac-toe idea. Then I built an app based on Redux one step at a time to demonstrate its key concepts.

I gave a talk last fall titled ‘How to Build Your Killer App’ as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. It was an overview of the entire process of building an app, intended for non-technical people who aren’t necessarily interested in learning how to code. I published my notes from the talk, which are a good read to understand the whole process and get pointers to additional resources.

HackNC happened the weekend of October 6–7th, 2018. Leading up to the main event, there were a few talks, including one I gave on React Native. It was intended for programmers who didn’t have any prior experience with React.js (on the web) or React Native (for mobile apps).

In the previous post, I implemented a graphic design as HTML and CSS. But the HTML will need to vary depending on what’s being displayed. We could simply duplicate the page for every variation, but this is cumbersome and leads to brittleness. Instead, we want to transition the HTML markup to a more malleable medium: code.

A common scenario professional web developers encounter is getting a graphic design and needing to implement it as a web page in HTML and CSS. I encountered this scenario with the Clem project, and I captured about 2 hours of video capturing my (unrehearsed) attempt to solve it.