Show HN: Relearning to code after 20 years

OP here - FYI - I was a software engineer at Novell over 20 years ago, then went to the business side. Last January for some crazy reason I decided to build a website. I couldn't write HTML last January, and though this is a pretty tame site by HN standards, I'm pretty proud of it. I've had to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquery, Angular, D3, Require, Node, Apache, Bootstrap, noSQL DB (Cloudant/Couch), linux system management - the works. It's been fun.

Excellent work. I enjoyed the visualizations.<p>On a somewhat tangential note, I&#x27;ve always been curious about sentences like this: &quot;Contact me at ross underscore rosen at revelision dot com&quot;<p>Are sentences like the one above an effective way to prevent spam? Or are most spambots sophisticated enough to account for slightly obscured spellings of email addresses?

Bravo! This resonates with me on a couple of levels.<p>While I&#x27;m still active in software development, I haven&#x27;t done web development in 10+ years. I&#x27;m currently working on a side-project which is also teaching me &quot;the works&quot; when it comes to web development and deployment. Of course, I will still be a n00b by the time I&#x27;m done, but I&#x27;ll soon have written and deployed my own RoR, data-driven website.<p>My side-project also shares a similar motivation as yours: <i>First, it&#x27;s my belief that most data isn&#x27;t taken advantage of because most people suck at data. I wanted to see if I could take an existing, well-picked-through data set and extract value, just by sucking less</i>. This could also describe my side project, which is in the sports domain.<p>You reaching this point is extremely inspiring. Thank you for sharing!

Which tools&#x2F;languages&#x2F;techniques did you enjoy learning and employing the most? It all sounds fun, but some of it sounds more fun than others (for example, I really love Python&#x27;s legibility, and am impressed by D3&#x27;s power but find it to have a pretty steep learning curve).

Very cool. I like the way that you show &#x27;means vs time&#x27; on the left panel and then you can dig into the actual distribution on the right panel. FYI, I think that, e.g., <a href="http://weather-explorer.com/history/country/US/state/WA/city/Seattle-Tacoma?USAF=727930&amp;WBAN=24233&amp;period=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;weather-explorer.com&#x2F;history&#x2F;country&#x2F;US&#x2F;state&#x2F;WA&#x2F;city...</a> should read &quot;Daily High Distribution&quot;, not &quot;Average Daily High&quot; or something. The mean trend line is on the left panel, and the right shows the the entire distribution. I&#x27;d be curious to see also what the 2nd and 3rd moments look like vs time, to see if the weather has an equal &#x27;spread&#x27; month over month or if it tightens up for certain periods of the year.<p>Also, you need to drop in a full post with commentary, analogous to what you did with your &quot;learning python&quot; post. More feedback about tools, resources, learning sites, etc.

Very nice and useful to boot!<p>While you might have forgotten some programming, and quite a bit has changed over the last couple of decades, what is quite interesting to me is the efficacy of the result. Although I don&#x27;t know what your word looked like 20 years ago, this probably shows that over the last couple of decades your sense of how to do something useful and present it has developed.<p>I would have guessed that a &quot;what I did to catch up after 20 years of non-programming&quot; project would have had a lousy UI (presentation), which yours does not. And while the presentation tools are better, the decision of <i>what</i> to present and <i>how</i> are still up the programmer.<p>So the 20 years weren&#x27;t wasted :-).

I really like this.<p>The data on sunshine seems off to me. Surely San Antonio, TX has more sunshine than Lexington, KY.

Very cool site...with your background, it shouldn&#x27;t be too hard to grok the concepts that you used to build the site...it&#x27;s just that there are a <i>lot</i> of them, and joining them together (efficiently, and attractively) takes experience...if this is your first (or fiftieth) web project, it&#x27;s one to be proud of.<p>(that said, you probably could&#x27;ve gotten away with just HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, D3, and Bootstrap, as the site could probably run off of flat static files...but even sussing out that architecture is its own skill)