React is a free and open source Javascript library for building user interfaces based on UI components.

Firebase is a backend replacement produced by Google which helps developers write fully featured web apps without having to handle things like databases and authentication directly. This workshop deals with the basics of using firebase

web design can be very overwhelming and confusing if not approached in the right manners, and this blog is about guiding you throughout your journey to build a very beautiful seamless web design using basic html and css code!

You are programmer that is sick of only doing class assignments and want to dabble with something that is closer to the real world? Well, this is the place for you my friend. This blog contains a video where we will go over both the theory and the practice of building your own API!

So you’re working on a project with another person or group of people for the first time, and you’re unsure of how to stay motivated or stay focused, what on earth do you do? Well there are multiple solutions to said issue, but we’ll be talking about a specific technique called pair programming.

If you don’t have experience with coding, you may be unsure on where to start with your web or mobile app ideas. Below are some tips that can help get you started.

Debugging is a fairly essential part of programming, and this post aims to give you a few general tools and strategies to help you debug effectively.

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

The CSS grid is a two-dimensional layout system that allows us to stack and line up content in columns and rows. One-dimensional Flexbox elements can be used for smaller components in the grid layout. And since it is built into CSS, the native properties allow for better performance.

This post will go through the basics of CSS grid, how to set up a simple grid layout, and how we used it to clean up our own website.

Clem is a program intended to make development with Clojure easier by helping explain Clojure’s sometimes cryptic error messages. It integrates with your REPL an uses an online database to attempt to find more human-friendly messages to explain your errors.

This post will go through the steps required to integrate Clem with Cursive.

Cursive is an IDE built on top of IntelliJ that supports syntax highlighting, code completion, repl integration and other features for Clojure and ClojureScript. Unlike many other Clojure IDEs, it is comparatively simple to install and has ordinary GUI.

Did you know that there is a programming language that’s not only consistently enjoyable to use, but also amazingly productive—and which was the highest paying language according to the 2018 Stack Overflow developer survey? In this talk, Professor of the Practice and App Lab director Jeff Terrell introduces the programming language Clojure.

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.