There are too many things I want to do

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Around these few months, my brain is flooded with plenty ideas and short bursts of passion juice, and it is suffocating.

I admit that I suck at prioritizing stuffs, I suck sorting out ideas, I suck at concentrating on one task at a time, most importantly I suck at putting commitment into finishing something. And the ideas just spilled out,

I need to write them down. So here they are, chances are most of them won’t be realized, either they are unfeasible to be realized, or I will run out of passion before they take any shape.

[App] Booksauce

You have a smartphone, and you are in a bookstore, you are shopping for books one shelf at a time, and a cover attracts you. You felt compelled to buy it and spend days to read through it, but one problem though, “Is the book good and worth my money and most importantly, time?”

You want to know what other readers think about it, so you start Googling “Amazon book title here” and read through the reviews. But if it’s a Chinese book, you gotta go to douban. Or if any other languages, chances of finding the reviews and rating become really really slim.

Booksauce aims to be a one-stop book reviewing center. Pretty much like goodreads, apart from gathering reviews, rating, booksauce has one proposed function that people nowadays probably won’t use anyway — book stock availability checker.

So when you search for a book, not only you get to know the ratings and reviews, you also get to know which bookstores near your house have the book, so you can go and grab a copy.

Over half of the respondents replied that Amazon is their one-stop book review center, this idea is declared unfeasible.

[App] Malaysia Wifi Database

I thought I was the only one who wanted this kind of app, months later one of myformer classmate approached me and told me this. So I was like yea… this idea can try try har, but after National Service first.

Your girlfriend is shopping and wasting your money, while you carry her shopping bags and sigh and found a place to sit down. Since almost all your money has turned into her cosmetics and clothings, you have no cellular data plan, you can only surf the web with Wifi.

Sure, there are like 20 Wifi stations popped up in the list. Unfortunately, 18 of them are secured, 1 of them has crappy signal and 1 of them simply doesn’t work. And within the 18 secured stations belong to shops, it is not nice to walk up to the Wifi enabled stores to ask for password without buying from them, so what do you do?

Well luckily you have MyWifiDb (short form) on your phone, it can work without Internet, like this app. It uses GPS (HTML5 demo here) to find out where you are and tell you list of SSID and their password which are supposedly legitimate for public uses. Then you can happily key in the password and Facebook as your girlfriend helps you to declare bankruptcy.

[Book] PLKN* guide in English

* National Service in Malaysia, 3 months compulsory “military” training camp for chosen 17-years old youths, whereby the chance of getting chose is like 1/3, totally random.

Why didn’t I say Malay? I suck at that language that’s why.

Pang Soon Gi (R.I.P.) is an ex-PLKN trainee. He released the only PLKN guide to the future participants so they know what they are up to, what they need to prepare and so on. Unfortunately this is the only guide in the market, and it is in Chinese. Nobody translated it into English or Malay for other races to read.

I have a few assumptions, which is not validated yet:

The book is already few years old, some of the information may be outdated, since I am going to enter soon I may be able to get some intel on new changes and so on.
He entered naturally, I mean he entered without defer-and-reenter process. But I am special case, I applied for reentering, I have different experience than him and so I have different kind of experience.
His book is a guide, but there is something I don’t feel satisfied, I prefer a diary like approach, a bit like No Easy Day.

I hope I can enter the camp soon and test these few points, see whether there is a need. If I really wrote one chances are I will release as free e-book or blog, like his one,

[Book] start: A real guide to kickstart your web development journey

Imagine this, you have 0 knowledge on IT field, on web development. You use Facebook frequently. And you have watched The Social Network, you felt so inspired, and you want to ride the wave and become the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Soon you took part in some business events, and you bumped into a web developer, you started a conversation with him.

“Anonoz, you know how to make websites right? I got a great idea! We can work together some time soon!”

“I am sorry, but I am not going to do it, why don’t you do it yourself?”

“I don’t know anything!”

There you go, you don’t know anything, you can start learning how to make a website right? Not that easy. Turns out I have no reliable or noob-friendly source for me to refer you to, I am sorry.

Thinking back in time, it took us years to actually learn our way around HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux etc. We may be doing it wrong, the journey should be much less bumpier than this.

There is no proper tutorial, apart from the fragmented HTML, CSS tutorials scattered around the web. All the web development books start from HTML, which in my opinion, is stupid. HTML doesn’t teach shit. And at some point, I realize we should be starting from the other end instead.

If a typical HTML book puts you in a maze with a handgun for you to kill zombie that suddenly pops up, this book will give you a jetpack, so you can fly up in the air, look at the whole maze, understand the big picture and you can learn whatever you want, with COMPLETE idea of what you are doing.

This is not a deep guide for each languages and markups, this serves as a guide to each starting points, and show the connections and relationships between all of them, and try to solve some of the mysteries that trapped us long time ago. And by showing these I hope that this book will make the web development learner’s journey much less bumpier.

I had been asking lots of people about the idea of this book, with a price tag of RM59, over 80% of the respondents said yes. Some of them said maybe, a very few of them said No. I guess the demand and market is there!

[Place] A hub for IT students

Since I am not in college anymore, my family asks me to find a job and move out around September or next year. I am thinking of renting a room or an entire condo unit outside if I can afford them.

I like the idea of sharing a unit with some like-minded or Master Minded people. We can support each other, encourage or even work on a startup together, isn’t that awesome?

But let’s take it one step further, why not have a whole condo unit that can accommodate 4 people and have a geek party every few weeks? Where IT students can gather around, exchange ideas, pass knowledge around and have fun? If they have great idea, they can pitch right in front of us, we can invite some investors and VCs and angels, and together we realize the dream.

The problem with Malaysian IT students in general is, they have no idea what they want to do after they finish their course, which SUCKS. There are lots of 100x more awesome things that can be done, IF they actually explore on their own. And a hub like this may be the key to change the life forever!

If they know about startup, if they know about funding, if they know more than just stupid Microsoft IDEs and Visual Basic, if they know Lean Startup method, if they know about all these, Malaysia will be a much more different place! Together we can have a local Silicon Valley, and we can have more entrepreneurs, innovators to make our lives much much better.

P/S: I got this idea from 1337hub, but is there one that targets college students?

How to become a good student

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Good students are highly sought upon. Parents and teachers look highly on you, you get a shitload of respects from your peers, and girls come rushing for your D. It is great to be a good student. Here a few tips on how to earn the title of Good Student, read on:

Be Obedient. Obey everything your parents and teachers say. If they tell you to be a doctor or lawyer, they have a good reason to do. These two occupations yield a lot of money, especially doctors can rip parents off as parents that get admitted into private hospitals have insurance on them. In that case you will earn a lot more than your peers and you get a chance to laugh at them. Doctors save lives too! The question is not why the question is why not?

Stay silent. If any good ideas suddenly surge into your mind, whether it’s from 6th sense, infinite intelligence or your non-existent god, don’t share with your classmates, because if you do, you get called to the front and get punished. It is fucking embarassing, don’t do that. Just diam diam and do your homework. Good ideas are never meant to be shared.

Believe everything they say. Take our history textbooks as example, when they say our previous 5 prime ministers are awesome heroes, they are. Tun Abdul Razak saved us from 513 race riots. Mahathir built a twin tower from his own pocket. And the warriors from Pasir Salak, they are really heroic for killing Birch, just like the heroic Osama bin Ladden and his minions piloted their aircrafts into the twin tower. If your maths text book says 2+2=5, then it is, believe EVERYTHING they wrote and said.

Don’t complain. Gosh! Stop being like a kid crying this and there! Do you know how fucking annoying you are for saying that teacher is molesting the girls? He didn’t! And if you do complain, I am gonna suspend you or terminate your study life FOREVER. Please, if you saw anything, keep your mouth shut and get over it, nothing really happened, you saw some illusion, that’s all.

Study HARD. You are a student, your job 24/7 is to study. Are you playing computer games again? Get off the computer and open your books! You are borned to realize our dreams, to be a straight As student, if you have your own dream, delete it, your dream is not as important as ours. Remember your parents who made you? They made you for a purpose – to get 11 A+. We never care how happy you are for making the water rockets, as long as you don’t get 11A+, you are stupid as fuck.

Scholarships. We don’t tell you to study hard without a good reason. We want you to get scholarship, once you get it you will be happy for the rest of your life! You won’t need to pay for you college fees! Even if you want to be a car mechanic, don’t be an apprentice at our local tyre shop, by all means, stay home and study hard and get 11A+. Then you can get a scholarship to study at Harvard Tyre Repairing School and get your dream job at our cheap local tyre shop.

Conclusion, after reading these tips, I hope that you will embrace your great schooling life and carry your responsibility as a student. You have a bright future ahead kiddo!

Start learning with PHP, not with HTML

But why not HTML first?

It does not answer your question nor satisfying your actual curiosity

After learning HTML, you still feel helpless, you still do not know how a real web site is built, how they work, what is the magical stuff behind them all. Simply said, learning HTML is not helping you to reach your destination fast enough. After all HTML is just markup, it’s just like highlighting a text book with marker pen, but there is not robotic hands (programming involved). HTML is not a programming language, it’s merely a markup.

It does nothing but one-way communication

Great! You have learned HTML! Now you can create static web pages, but that’s it.

HTML is one-way communication, whatever the coder writes, whatever the visitor reads. There is no interaction, there is no exchange of information going on. Again, learning HTML does pretty much nothing to your web development beginner life.

HTML is just a way to present data generated by the web server, creating HTML files manually will be proved to be unscalable, unmaintainable. Learn PHP will tell you how things can be 100x better.

It can be learned later on

Face it, HTML is the de facto front-end markup language of modern web, there is no way you will not bump into it. Since you are going to deal with it anyway, I suggest you to postpone your HTML learning, and learn something that actually does something instead.

A bigger picture

Now, if you have not start learning HTML yet, great, for those who are learning HTML, put down your pen for a moment and let’s think about the big picture.

Chances are, if you learn how to write HTML files and open it up in web browser, you are nowhere near learning how web sites actually work.

To serve a website, we need a server. A server is just like any other computer, but with a special program built in to serve the web (for example, WAMP, now install it). Usually in the realm of open source, we use Apache (Linux thingy) to do it, some Microsoft guys will use IIS, but that doesn’t matter.

The server takes request (URL) and process it. If the URL is requesting any other static files (that don’t need to be parsed and processed by server), the server will hand over the file as is, like typical HTML files.

If the URL is requesting a PHP file, the PHP file is parsed by PHP program, and output is generated. The output can be HTML, text files, images, sounds, in short any file type imaginable. Yes, PHP is one of the way we can pass instructions to a server for it to do stuff.

To store and read data systematically, we can attach a database onto it, for instance in WAMP, we have MySQL, a widely used open source database system. PHP + MySQL are super imba powerful combo, and they are over level 9000 once you realize what they can do!

Note: There are plenty of alternatives out there apart from PHP and MySQL, but for beginners’ sake, to reduce complexity, I will just use them as example. Alternatives of PHP include ASP.Net, Python, Ruby on Rails, Cold Fusion…

Why PHP is chosen

It’s easy to pick up

PHP may not be the best language, for again, for beginner’s sake, it’s great. Most servers out there support PHP by default, you don’t need to install extra stuffs for them to parse PHP files correctly. In most of the time, your codes will just work.

What does a simple PHP code look like?

<?php

    echo "Hello Guys. Two plus two equals to ".2+2;
?>

You may not understand a crap, doesn’t matter, I still recommend you to learn PHP more than HTML+CSS now.

It is widely adopted

A wide adoption is crucial to the learner, you can Google a solution easily, or when you ask for help in a group, helps come much easily.

Nowadays, the job demand for PHP programmers is soaring high, knowing PHP gives you a fair amount of advantage if you want to settle down for web development job.

PHP tutorials can be found easily, recently Codecademy starts PHP coding tutorials as well, I strongly suggest you to check it out. Other than that I have also used W3Schools, Tizag and PHP.Net itself for ultimate referencing.

It ACTUALLY answers your questions

Once you start walking deeper into PHP + MySQL tutorials, you will suddenly have a lightbulb in your head and you say “AHHA! So I can actually use these shits to build a Facebook! Zuckerberg you are screwed!” Congratulations! You got your long time mystery answered!

Learning PHP in the beginning will give you a much bigger picture than starting out with HTML. In fact when you are learning PHP, you will eventually learn HTML at the same time, there is no point dedicating time slots to HTML, because you are already learning them.

One Warning about Learning PHP in Codecademy

You will learn about the syntax of PHP, but you will never know how PHP website is setup in real life.

Remember I told you to install WAMP? It’s a server, a full-fledged working and running server right in your computer. You can host a real website in it, if you configure it right you can even let people from around the globe to access it.

You can learn how to write PHP codes in Codecademy, but soon or later you will need to learn how to deploy them in real server, real environment.

How to start?

Install WAMP first, for PHP people, if you want to know where to put your PHP files and how to use them, read this.

Read tutorials online to understand the basics, you can either follow the tutorial on W3Schools or do some exercises on Codecademy.

If you have any problem, do not hesitate to Google, or if you have some questions cannot be Googled, don’t be afraid to ask on programmer groups, or StackOverflow. But before asking, make sure you have done your homework, and ask smartly.

Once you have hit the AHHA moment, you can start to explore more. If you have learned JavaScript (avoid jQuery while learning), you can start to learn AJAX and start to create the next kick ass web application.

If you have seen the word “PHP framework” like CodeIgniter, CakePHP that promise to save your time while developing, don’t learn them yet, learn them only when you fully grasp the basics of PHP, or you will wreck will hard-learned PHP skills.

P/S: What I did that time

To be honest, I started out with PHP before HTML. After I watched “The Social Network”, I downloaded the Facemash clone and uploaded to my site, spending hours figuring out the MySQL and reading the codes, I learned a bit of PHP, then I started to mod it and wreck it. Eventually I seek help from resources like W3Schools and learned the basics.

I learn HTML, CSS just to prettify the data output of the god-awesome PHP. I only learned JavaScript to take advantage of HTML5 LocalStorage and AJAX. So yes, I learned the other few languages only by the need driven by PHP learning.

And I think I did the right thing, HTML and CSS alone are not worth my time, I am a highly logical person, I belong to back-end. I have tried front-end development (HTML, CSS, JS) but it didn’t really fit me.

Anonoz Burps

Unprofessionally Professional KL Web Developer