Hello.
My name is Dan Shiffman and I am here
to tell you about the new Coding Trade
website, which you can find right
now at thecodingtrain.com.
The website is meant to catalog, organize all the videos,
help you find them, as well as include
all of the metadata for all the videos.
And it has something called a Passenger Showcase, which
is a way for you to submit projects that you made
and have them featured on the website,
along with the videos themselves.
So I've been making videos for a little over 10 years.
At some point, I started putting them on YouTube,
and the channel grew and found an audience.
And then the community helped build a website
for the channel, which was an alternate way
to organize the material beyond what YouTube offers,
which is essentially video pages and playlists.
About a year ago or so--
I don't remember the timing--
I invited Design Systems International,
which is a design firm that works with code and computation
to develop systems for design to help imagine, reinvent,
and build a new Coding Train website that helps you navigate
through everything.
One of my favorite things about what they did with the website
is they used the inspiration of a train ticket
as the design for the website.
So I'll read to you from the case study.
Just as a train ticket uses a horizontal grid
to organize travel information, we built out the page layouts
in a horizontal grid format containing buttons, headings,
text, and images.
So when you first arrive on the website,
there's a homepage which is going
to show you a preview of all the different aspects
of the website.
So there's Coding Challenges, there's Tracks,
there's the passenger showcase, and there's
all sorts of ancillary material, like an FAQ and guides,
for how to contribute to the website
and how to learn to program and all that kind of stuff.
And then, once you're there, it's
a matter of picking choosing where you want to go.
So a Coding Challenge is a video,
where I build a project from start to finish.
It doesn't necessarily require that you watch other videos.
Although, it does require a basic foundation
in programming, and for those videos on the web page,
there are time codes.
There's metadata, like the coding example.
So if I built in processing, you can click and find
the processing code.
You can find P5GS code, which will link you right to the web
editor, so you can just run the code right there
in the browser.
Any things that I reference in the videos,
you'll find links to those, related videos,
other kinds of challenges, and then
the Passenger Showcase, things that people have made, inspired
by, or related to the video are there on that page as well.
So that's the Coding Challenges.
There are also the Tracks.
The Tracks are collections of videos.
So they're main tracks, which are essentially
sequences of videos.
So sometimes, I have videos that all
follow what is something like a syllabus for a full semester
course.
There's Nature of Code.
There's Beginner's Guide to Machine Learning.
There's Code, just an intro to programming with P5GS.
And then there are also Sidetracks,
and the Sidetracks are collections
of videos that are maybe linked by a theme,
so less about watching them in order.
But I've made videos for Pi Day.
So anything that has to do with maybe polar coordinates
or trigonometry, the number pi might
be in a sidetrack of videos.
I have a sidetrack called Algorithmic Botany,
so it's any videos that have to do with algorithms
to generate plant-like or tree-like structures.
For those, when you go to the Track page,
you'll find all of the videos listed in order.
And you can click around them and then
find the individual video pages as well,
which have all the same material as the Challenge page.
There's also an FAQ, so those kinds of frequently
asked questions that I'm always getting over email
or on YouTube comments.
So how do I get started, or how do I find the code,
or how do I suggest a topic?
Those questions are all there on the FAQ.
Maybe you have some questions that aren't on the FAQ.
Please, send them to me.
Ask them.
And then there are the guides.
So there's a guide for how do you get started?
If you're totally new to programming
and have never done anything before,
that guide will walk you through where
are the videos that you can start with,
and how do you approach beginning?
There's also the How to Maintain the Website guide, which
is not for the faint of heart.
It's a bit more technical there's
a lot of different aspects to how the website is
designed, built, and generated.
But if you're interested in that,
and you want to help contribute to improve the website
or have new ideas, that guide will really help you.
And then there's the Passenger Showcase guide,
and this is really the most important part of the website,
in my view.
It's really one of the reasons why
I wanted to create a new website to have a way
to feature the hundreds and maybe thousands of projects
that people have made over the years from watching the videos.
So every video page has the Passenger Showcase on it.
There's an entire Passenger Showcase
page, which shows everything that's ever been submitted.
You can also search by passenger or author--
I don't know what the term to use is here--
and you should submit.
So the guide will show you how you
can enter all the information to a form to submit your project.
You can also make a pull request,
which might be something that sounds a little scary to you.
Maybe, it's something that you haven't done before,
but the Coding Train community will welcome you
with open arms.
So please, if you've never made a pull request
or used GitHub before, this could
be a place for you to try.
And don't worry, you can't break anything.
You can't do it wrong.
We are here to help you do that.
There's also the About page, which I would really encourage
you to take a look at.
So many people over the years have helped me with the Coding
Train, have made the coding trade happen
in all sorts of ways that maybe you don't even know about.
I'll try to include everybody linked in the video description
here who has helped make the Coding Train happen.
All right, everyone.
I've been to wrap this up.
I'm going to take us out with this train whistle that
is laser etched with some of my favorite coding projects.
We've got the 10 print design here, a random walk.
This looks like marching squares of Perlin noise and then
the Snake Game.
Let's see what kind of sound this thing makes.
Here we go.
[TRAIN WHISTLE]
Look at that.
It's actually pretty darn good.
[MUSIC PLAYING]