Matthew MacDonald

After thousands of traditionally published pages, I'm trying something new: a self-published book for kids & beginners learning to code. Meet "𝗔 𝗧𝗶𝗻𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗝𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗦𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗽𝘁", released today in a free PDF gumroad.com/l/eARLn (Details in thread)

And that it had impeccable tech reviewing :)

How not to handle #null. Like all good bugs, this site only does this every once in a while

Do you put "don't ship broken software" under the heading "ship with more confidence"? Because QA is there to protect you from the bugs you miss, like when Apple reintroduced a fixed jailbreak vulnerability in iOS 12.4 (one eg of many). A regression test would've caught it.

I became a bit obsessed with teaching my three kids coding during the pandemic. I have a whole flowchart of options here medium.com/young-coder/a-pro… and a free book that uses JavaScript exercises that you can run online on CodePen prosetech.gumroad.com/l/eARL… Hope it helps someone!

For younger kids you can program Minecraft in Blockly (a visual programming language like Scratch). I tried it and wrote about it with my kids medium.com/young-coder/learn…

Of course *you* know that a #ChatGPT response is a pattern of heuristically likely words that often contains factual mistakes. But do you know how deep the rabbit hole goes? medium.com/young-coder/chatg…

Valid points!

Talking about the gradual decline of #WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), the outsourcing controversy, and the strange fact that #WinForms is still here after two decades. medium.com/young-coder/wpf-b… #dotnet

I haven't read it but I'm always a fan of different & quirky formats. I was actually lined up to write a HF book years ago but I couldn't get excited about the topic (SharePoint).

If one of your technology resolutions includes #mastodon that's probably a good resolution

And if you don't remember why you were following, here's a quick recap. I chat about the .NET stack, web dev, future tech, and--occasionally--weird creative things like my coding-with-ninjas book for kids.

Elon & Marjorie Taylor Greene are just friends of convenience. If you figure out whether it's worse to be an immoral opportunist or an insane true believer, let me know. 3/3

This has 1% to do with politics and 99% to do with a cynical troll who just believes capturing "conservative energy" will boost his platform, compensate for lost ad revenue, and eventually make him money. 2/3

Before anyone debates me about the "free speech absolutist" running this platform into the ground, let me state my full opinion for the record. 1/3

Well, I'm out! The Fauci conspiracy theories, ex-Twitter-employee abuse, and dishonest moderation policy made me reconsider my time in the bird circus. I'd love to meet all you fine folks again over at Mastodon! I'm @prosetech@hachyderm.io

The #midjourney prompt everyone wants to write: /imagine x,y,z but please put the right number of fingers on each hand