Wrong.

That lack of Saturday morning cartoon knowledge apparently carries more weight in your adult life than you ever imagined it would. And that’s saying a lot. You have a great imagination. You had to invent ways to entertain yourself without the use of a TV. “Go play outside” was practically the first phrase you learned, and just about any stick found lying on the ground could be turned into a pistol or a slingshot. But none of that matters now. As an adult, your peers are reminiscing about cartoons you never saw, comics you never got to read are being brought to life via modern CGI animation, and retro-(insert any word here) has never been bigger. You manage to change the subject often enough to avoid talking about these foreign topics, but eventually it catches up to you, and bites you hard. How? Like this…

You’ve decided to start a new career in the ever-evolving world of computer programming. Excited, you dive head-first into a coding boot camp, lets call it #VetsWhoCode. You quickly immerse yourself in the material, and day by day learn a little more. About half-way through the program, you’re feeling pretty good about yourself and proud of your accomplishments thus far. Then it happens. Your instructor, (who named your cohort “Avengers”, this should have been your first clue…) finds out that you know nothing about comics or cartoons. You blush a little and try to laugh it off, as you have in the past to get past this awkward part of the conversation. But your instructor doesn’t let it go. He presses further, “%##*^%…don’t know about Marvel comics?!!… ^%#&%… OR DRAGON BALL Z?!?!?! Rabble rabble rabble!!!!” It is at this moment you realize that laughing it off won’t work this time. You feel the blood rushing to your face as you scramble to Google search his questions as they’re being asked.

But not even the world’s most powerful search engine could save you from this mess. Next thing you know, you’re being assigned extra homework that forces you to research children’s cartoons in depth. You can almost see smoke coming out of your instructor’s ears as he starts bombarding you with links to start your research, almost as if he had them in queue, ready to unload on some poor unsuspecting soul. His wrath spreads to your classmates as he starts dishing out TV-based homework like candy. You see fire in his eyes and horns growing on his head as he laughs maniacally while turning your classmates against you. He tells them its your fault they are being punished before signing off in a cloud of smoke for the weekend. You can feel the end drawing near…

Begrudgingly, you start researching Dragon Ball Z per the assignment stipulations. You learn a little about the show, and start coding something that represents your due diligence. You contemplate being a smartass by putting a character from Pokemon in the project to see if he’ll even notice, but then decide against it, because he WILL notice. Nerd.

Then something special happens. You realize you’re using coding skills you have just learned to build something you know nothing about. You realize in the real world, when you are working for someone that wants web development for their business, of which you know nothing about, it’s up to you to research and find a solution to get the job done. You then start to think maybe your instructor didn’t do this to punish you, but rather to teach you how to creatively and effectively implement solutions to problems. Then you remember that maniacal laugh… no this was a punishment for sure.

But you gained something out of it. And that’s all that matters.

Here’s a link to your DBZ codepen, in case you forgot how you made it…

Well, it’s an acronym that stands for Cascading Style Sheets. But what is that?

Cascading Style Sheets are used in just about every website you see today. It is the language developers use to change the appearance of a website. If you picture a website being built like a car, CSS is the whole design element of the car. The color, the way the headlights and taillights look and function, the type of wheels, the interior layout and features, etc. CSS works hand in hand with HTML (which is much like the car’s frame) to create websites that are very versatile and aesthetically pleasing.

How does it work?

CSS uses classes to separate different elements of a website. Those classes are called within the HTML document, effectively changing the properties of whatever that element is. For instance, if you had the words “I know CSS” in HTML, and wanted them to be colored red, you would assign them a class and specify what color that class is in your CSS document.

The example above shows two separate documents, in case you can’t tell. The one on the left is the HTML and the right is CSS, and is a visual depiction of our scenario above. This, of course, is a very simple example of how CSS works, and an actual website’s CSS page contains MUCH more code. Other attributes can be added to the “smart” class, such as: background colors, borders, margins, fonts and font sizes, etc.

In summary, CSS is a powerful language that can turn a bland looking, black and white text into a colorful, unique calligraphy. It can change where things like pictures, text, tables, borders, etc. are placed on a page. It can also change background and text colors, opacity, and even transform elements on a page to do different animated effects.

If you’re interested in front-end development, learning the ins and outs of CSS are a must!

What is it?

Big O notation is essentially a way for people to determine efficiency in an algorithm. That’s the short answer. There is actually a lot of math involved with determining the big O, which is where most of us will get lost, so I will try to explain this as simple as possible.

There are varying degrees of big O, each representing how an algorithm will perform. Here are a few examples of big O notation.

O(1): For every input, no matter how big it is, the algorithm will perform in the same amount of time.

O(N): For every input, the amount of time needed to perform is relative. So, the higher the input, the higher the amount of time it takes to perform, linearly.

O(N²): For every input, the time it takes to complete is exponentially higher. This is not an ideal situation, as it is not very efficient.

O(log N): The time it takes to complete tasks is exponentially shorter than O(N). This is the most ideal big O, as it is the highest performing notation here. It actually performs better as more data is inputted.

Determining the big O notation of a simple equation is mainly finding out where the big jumps in output would be. For instance, if you had x+1, it would be O(N), as the +1 doesn’t really make a difference when you get into higher numbers for the x value. On the other hand, if you had x³+x, the output will be exponentially higher with every input. The lone x doesn’t matter compared to x³ here. This would be O(N³). This is much simpler when looking at equations with exponents, but much different when you have to try to find the big O of an algorithm.

This is a very basic overview of what big O notation is. Designed to be an ice breaker and to give a general understanding of the subject, enough to make you want to learn more, or run away screaming.

You're on it, your friends are on it, your parents are on it to some smaller degree, and kids 10 years younger than you have pretty much mastered it. The internet has literally changed the way we as humans function in our day to day lives: the way we communicate, the way we shop, and the way we entertain ourselves, just to name a few. So what is the internet?

Picture a Town

In short, the internet is a wire that connects a bunch of electronic devices and allows them to talk to each other. Kind of vague though…

IP Addresses

Let’s picture the world wide web as a town. We’re looking down at this town from the sky, like we’re in a helicopter or something. The houses are our computers. Each house has its own address, this is like your computer’s IP address, each one is different. The road is the internet, a means of connecting the houses. In order for your data to reach the internet, you have to go through an ISP (Internet Service Provider). In our town scenario, let’s say the ISP is your gated driveway. You can’t get on the road without the gate opening and allowing you access.

Bandwidth

Just like in our town, the internet can only send so much information through at a time. If there are too many cars on our road at a time, then we get a traffic jam and no one goes anywhere. This is how bandwidth works as well. The more lanes you create, the more cars can get through at a time.

Sending/Receiving Data

You want to give your friend Billy, who lives across town, a copy of your enlarged Mona Lisa painting. Billy loves Da Vinci’s work. You could strap that giant masterpiece to the roof of your Smart Car and drive slowly, but you have things to do, ain’t nobody got time for that. So you chop up the picture into a few sections, and put each section into your roommate’s Smart Cars. You all have Smart Cars. Then you all convoy out to Billy’s house, put the pieces back together, and voila! Billy now has a big painting on his doorstep. This is how the internet works, it sends information broken down into smaller packets in order for things to be efficient and fast.

TCP/IP

In order for all of this to work, there has to be a set of rules to follow. The TCP/IP is basically that set of rules, and was created as a way for computers to talk to each other. Going back to our town scenario, the DMV is our TCP/IP. It gives us guidelines on how to get from one house to another.

Websites

How do websites work? In our town, we can picture stores, the post office, parks, etc. as websites. For instance, let’s say we want to check our mail. We put “Post Office” in our GPS, and now we have a path to get there. “Post Office” is just a nickname for the address it’s at (ex. 123 Generic Road). This is essentially what the DNS (Domain Name System) is. All the websites you type in, (ex. www.google.com) are just nicknames for their IP addresses, which are just sets of numbers that are hard to remember. These websites usually contain lots of data, so they need a place to store that data, which brings us to servers.

Servers

Servers are how data is stored and accessed through the internet. In our town analogy, they’re like the warehouses for the stores. The post office has a giant warehouse to store all of the mail. When we go to get our mail, it is pulled from the warehouse to be delivered to you. You then go home with your mail and open it.

Summary

This has been a very wide view of how the internet works as a whole, there is much more involved, but hopefully relating it to tangible things like houses, cars, and roads will help solidify a basic understanding of a technology we all use everyday.