resources

Course Slides

Meeting 1

• Welcome to Startup Programming 2016
• How to build a software product?
• Standing on the shoulders of giants - On software reuse and software composition (v4).
• A few of the past projects:
  • beLocal - lessons learned
  • Power Planner
  • Check Me In - continued to Microsoft's accelerator and then to create Screemo, a successful startup [Use cases, Lessons learned].
  • What2Wear
  • AroundRoid
  • StrEAT
  • Good2Go
  • UniZone
  • FlyingBoard
  • The Reporter
  • SporTeam
  • Valto
  • EZ-Launch [on Google Play]

Meeting 2

• Startup Slam 3.0
• Web development overview
• Mobile development - advice on how to start
• UI/UX part 1 - Design Thinking

Meeting 3

• Git, GitHub and Working Together

Meeting 4

• So you want to build a thing by Jason Trill

Meeting 6

• Software Management for people who just want to get stuff done by Cliff
• Slides of the Benevity guest talk by Jim Olson (product design at Benevity) and Jon Wiggens (UI Designer at Benevity, previously at EA)
• Dev Ops - 12 factor apps by Cliff

Meeting 7

• Testing for web developers by Clarke Brunsdon
• UI/UX - thinking about the user by Peggy

Recommended Reading and Watching

Go to recommended reading section.

Resources

Useful Links

• Getting started tutorials for newcomers - in Java, Python, and Node.js
• GitHub Student Developer Pack

Cloud Computing Services

• Information on various cloud computing services [link]

Google App Engine

• Google App Engine - Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that lets you build and run applications on Google’s infrastructure.
• App Engine Shoutout (Python, Java) - "Hello World" for App Engine in Python (a bit outdated but with a few minor changes can work).
• App Engine with Python and Flask - If you prefer to work with Flask instead of the default webapp2 framework.

Python

• Google Python Class Day - A basic tutorial for python by Nick Parlante. There are links to his exercises as well.
• PyCharm - A pretty good IDE for Python (free for students).

Web

Development

• WebStorm - A good web development IDE (free for students).

JavaScript

• Yarn - A JavaScript package manager
• Douglas Crockford's Javascript - Useful links for JavaScript. Watch the video courses (in the bottom of the page).
• jQuery - If you plan to use JavaScript in your application, you should consider using JQuery library.
• jQuery plugins - A few nice plugins for jQuery.
• JSDB - Database of JavaScript libraries, frameworks & plugins.
• Advanced JavaScript course - A nice collection of resources to learn JavaScript.

React

• React Home - A component-based front-end JavaScript library built by Facebook.
• 9 things every ReactJS beginner should know - A list of 9 basic guidelines to follow when developing in react.
• Using React with Webpack Tutorial - A tutorial explaining the fundamentals of Webpack, and how to set up a basic development environment.

NodeJS

• NodeJS Home - Serverside JavaScript platform.
• NPM - Node Package Manager, a package manager initially built for NodeJS Packages but has since expanded to host packages for front-end development as well.

Sending email

• Mailgun - Sending the first 10,000 emails every month is free.
• SendGrid - Sending the first 200 emails every day is free.
• Amazon SES - Pay as you go.

Continuous Integration

• Travis CI - Easy to use continuous integration tool (see tutorial).
• Coveralls - Coveralls works with popular continuous integration tools (such as Travis CI) to show test coverage history and statistics.

Requirements and User Stories

• What's in a Story - Simple way to describe user stories / requirements for your product (behavior-driven development).
• Cucumber - (Ruby) tool to support Behaviour-Driven Development.

User Onboarding

• Onboarding design examples from various known products.

Metrics

• An introduction to metrics
• Some good examples for metrics in these slides, based on the goal/phase of your product

Mobile

• ionic - Open source front-end framework for developing hybrid mobile apps with HTML5 (for both iOS and Android).

Android

• Android developers - Start here if you develop for android.
• Dashboards - This page provides information about the relative number of devices that share a certain characteristic, such as Android version or screen size.
• Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals - An online web course (on Udacity) teaching android development. The full course materials - all the videos, quizzes, and forums - are available for free for all students by selecting “View Courseware”.
• Device Art Generator - The device art generator enables you to quickly wrap app screenshots in real device artwork. This provides better visual context for your app screenshots on your website or in other promotional materials.

Facebook

Note: Facebook API changes constantly and frequently. Please take that into account when using any kind of documentation, tutorials and when building your app.

• Creating Your First Facebook Application - How-to: Creating your first Facebook application 
• Facebook and Google App Engine - How-To: Create a Facebook App with Google App Engine and Best Buy Remix 

Visualization

• The Data Visualization Catalogue
• Google Charts - Google chart tools are powerful, simple to use, and free. For example, it allows to dynamically generate QR codes.

Screen Recording

These tools can help you create demo videos, and tutorial videos for your application. Use this demo video for inspiration.

On Windows OS:

• CamStudio - can capture your screen (and audio) and record it
• VirtualDub - if you need to compress or edit the video

On Ubuntu:

• RecordMyDesktop - can capture your screen
• WinFF - you can convert to other formats
• Avidemux - if you need to edit or compress the video

Presentation and Slide Design

• Slide Design for Developers - Nice, though older, blog post on easy ways to improve slide decks.
• The Talk on Talks - A more recent post, with great pointers on presenting, and a video where Zach Holman comments on his own presentation. He also published a lot of tips on speaking.io

Useful Links and Tools

• ZenHub - ZenHub enhances the GitHub workflow with a visual way to organize your features, and projects.
• Let’s Encrypt - Free SSL/TLS encryption.
• Google API Explorer - A quick and easy way to see all available API's provided by Google.
• Build Podcast - A cool podcast about technology tools for design and development (each episode covers a different tool).
• Sublime Text - A recommended text editor/"light IDE", especially for web developers. Other good options are Brackets, TextMate (only for Mac) or Atom by GitHub.
• A badass list of frontend development resources.
• Create product shots with ease - Dunnnk, Magic Mockups, Frame, and MockUPhone.
• Mixpanel - Web and mobile analytics. It provides better insights than Google Analytics, because instead of focusing on page views, it focuses on tracking workflow.

Finding Users and Promoting Your Application

• Product Hunt shows new applications on a daily basis (Reddit-like interface). You can submit your own application, and it might get noticed by some of the most important people in the industry.

Web and Mobile Prototyping

• Balsamiq - A web service (or desktop tool) for UI mockup sketching.
• invision - Quickly transform your designs into beautiful, fully interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions & animations for web, iOS & Android (Free).
• proto.io - Mobile prototyping (15 days free trial).
• Adobe XD - A prototyping tool for high fidelity prototypes.

Web Parsers and Scrapers (or What to do when there is no API available?)

• Parsing existing websites - This tool allows you to extract any content from the Web, and get it in various formats.
• Never write a web scraper again - A simple to use web scraper.