Christi Turner
    RTGX, Inc.
cturner@rtgx.com

Sustainability Outreach and Communications Intern:

Intern will report to Sustainability Coordinator. The position will be 8 hours per week. Hours may vary to accommodate meetings, events, and interviews. Additional tasks may be assigned. Intern must demonstrate evidence of interest and background in sustainability and must feel comfortable reaching out to professionals, peers, and faculty. Intern must be a current UMBC student. Please submit a cover letter detailing: 1) why this position interests you 2) what related skills and experiences you possess 3) any other groups, activities, jobs or time commitments you are currently engaged in by September 26th.

The sustainability outreach and communications intern will assist in developing communication outreach around the following topics in coordination with staff, groups, and committees on campus:

Sustainability Related Accomplishments and Champions

Energy Conservation Efforts

Transportation

Research and Education

Recycling, Waste, and Compost

Search job number 9260919 in UMBCworks.

Learning how to code can be a daunting task for anyone, whether you’re a complete beginner or an experienced professional. Just getting started is hard enough, but sometimes the best still get stuck.

Reverse Engineering

If you’ve never coded before, Treehouse is a great way to get started. Once you have your footing and you know a language or two, it’s easy to understand code you’ve never seen by reverse engineering, or as I like to call it, “breaking stuff” to see how it works. This method rarely gets the emphasis it deserves (especially in formal educational environments), yet it’s amazing how useful it is for learning. In fact, being able to understand code without any instruction is an essential job skill, because it’s common for programmers to maintain code they didn’t write themselves.

Now before you take a proverbial hammer to your favorite website, you should know that you can’t just break anything with reckless abandon and expect to learn something. You have to take a methodical approach and break one thing at a time, then analyze the results of your changes. When breaking things, you should be looking for the relationship between parts to understand their function in the whole.

Learn to Break Stuff

Recently I was forced to do some reverse engineering in order to advance my own knowledge. I’ve become interested in 3D programming in the browser, which is a mixture of well explored territory and new frontiers. Three.js is an abstraction for a much more complex language called WebGL, and while three.js is useful enough to be worth using, it’s also poorly documented. How do you learn code without an instruction manual? Reverse engineering is the only way. The following is a code example that uses three.js to create a light:

var light = new THREE.PointLight(0xffffff);
    light.position.set(-100,200,100);
    scene.add(light);

If you have some programming experience, you might be able to read this and figure out most of what’s happening here. If there are any blanks or assumptions you’re unsure about, you can test them with the following techniques:

1. Delete one line at a time to see if it’s necessary for your goals.
2. Delete one line at a time to better understand its function. Even if you think you know what a line does, try deleting it anyway to test your assumptions.
3. Change variables and function arguments to see if you can manipulate them in a way that matches your mental model.
4. Swap the order of various lines to see if things can be done “out of order” or if there’s some significance to the sequence of operations.

As you test each line, you’ll start to build a mental model and make corrections to other assumptions you made previously. Soon, the whole picture will start to make sense. Using the techniques on this example, we might discover that we can change the position of the light by reseting the XYZ coordinates, and that each line is necessary in order for the whole thing to work. Another tip to get going more quickly is to use contextual clues, as many languages are quite similar. In the example, a hexadecimal value is used when creating the light. If you’ve ever coded in CSS, you’ll probably recognize this as a color value, even though the formatting is a bit different.

Reverse engineering isn’t the only way to learn and it should always be backed by more formal material whenever it’s available. In fact, I would argue that tutorials become more valuable once you have some of the context mapped for yourself. If you learn best by diving into problems head on, breaking stuff is one of the fastest paths to understanding.

The post The Secret to Learning Code appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

If you are an employee of UMBC (50% time or more) or a “Non-Traditional” student, and if you are working on your graduate school courses, proposal, or dissertation, then this event is for you! We’ve worked with our UMBC employees who are also graduate students at UMBC, College Park, Northeastern, and other institutions.  This year, we are extending this opportunity to non-traditional students who are coming back to school or working full-time. This time is for you! This session will have support, coaching, and food will be provided for you on both days.

You work hard every day to serve others on our campus! You may be supporting your family members, or you have decided to take some time for yourself to reach your goals.  Now, let us work with you to finish your graduate degree. This version of the “Dissertation House” was created just for you!

Dissertation House for UMBC Employees and Non-Traditional Students
Friday, 10/11/13,   9:00 – 5:00 PM (Part I), COMM 331
Saturday, 10/12/13, 10:00 – 3:00 PM(Part II), COMM 318/COMM 332

If you are a graduate student from another school within the University System of Maryland, you may apply to participate in this session, and your application will be considered. You are responsible for your own transportation and lodging. 

UMBC’s graduate students: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/18934

ALL applicants must adhere to the regular “Dissertation House Application” procedures: http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/apply/