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Introduction

Nael Shiab, senior data producer, CBC News

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

Kai Teoh, The Dallas Morning News

Carla Astudillo, Texas Tribune

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The questions

What was the first programming language you learned?

What challenges did you face?

Which programming languages does your newsroom primarily use?

Which programming language do you use most often in your projects, and why?

What are some great resources for learning how to code?

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Tazbia

What was the first programming language you learned?

What challenges did you face?

Which programming languages does your newsroom primarily use?

Which programming language do you use most often in your projects, and why?

What are some great resources for learning how to code?

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First programming language I learnt

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

First programming language that made me love coding

// Definition of a class named 'Dog'

class Dog {

// Instance variables (attributes)

String name;

String breed;

int age;

// Constructor to initialize instance variables

public Dog(String name, String breed, int age) {

this.name = name;

this.breed = breed;

this.age = age;

}

// Method to display dog information

public void displayInfo() {

System.out.println("Name: " + name);

System.out.println("Breed: " + breed);

System.out.println("Age: " + age);

}

// Main method (entry point of the program)

public static void main(String[] args) {

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Challenges

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

Port over your project to fit the newsroom template that is in another language language
Do it all!

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Programming languages my newsroom primarily uses

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

Backend / Server-side Programming

Frontend / Web Dev

This is an alert box.

</div>

/* The alert message box */

.alert {

padding: 20px;

background-color: #f44336; /* Red */

color: white;

margin-bottom: 15px;

}

Databases and datasets

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Whitespace significance
Wealth of libraries and packages
Rich Ecosystem for Data Tasks
APIs!! Spotipy - a python library for Spotify API

Python has an extensive ecosystem of libraries tailored for data tasks:

Data Manipulation: Libraries like Pandas and NumPy simplify data cleaning and analysis.
Visualization: Tools such as Matplotlib and Seaborn make it easy to create compelling visual stories.
Web Scraping and APIs: Packages like BeautifulSoup and Requests help in collecting data from various sources.
Machine Learning: Python’s compatibility with machine learning libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch

Most often used programming language

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

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Resources for learning how to code

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

Coursera for courses on visualization, data analytics or statistics
W3schools for quick code checks

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Resources for learning how to code

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

Play around with a simple colab notebook and some off-the-shelf open data
Read methodologies of any data stories and read a lot - make an ‘inspo’ drive
“Vibecode” with Generative AI tools

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Resources for learning how to code

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

Practise using Visualization platforms like

Datawrapper
Observable
Mapbox Studio

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Resources for learning how to code

Tazbia Fatima, Hearst Newspapers DevHub

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Kai

What was the first programming language you learned?

What challenges did you face?

Which programming languages does your newsroom primarily use?

Which programming language do you use most often in your projects, and why?

What are some great resources for learning how to code?

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PHP powers most of the web(?)

WordPress etc

Like HTML, but better (don’t @ me)

What was the first programming language you learned?

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Coding tutorials

Hello world?
Twitter clone?
Tic tac toe?

The lonely newsroom coder

Don’t know what you don’t know

Everything, everywhere, all at once

What challenges did you face?

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Slack

News Nerdery!
Lonely Coders Community!

Documentation
Stack Overflow
Udemy, Codecademy

Most importantly: Have a project/goal

What are some great resources for learning how to code?

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Which programming languages does your newsroom primarily use?

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Analysis

Python + Pandas

Projects

LA Times’ Baker framework

Which programming language do you use most often in your projects, and why?

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Carla

What was the first programming language you learned?

What challenges did you face?

Which programming languages does your newsroom primarily use?

Which programming language do you use most often in your projects, and why?

What are some great resources for learning how to code?

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What's the first programming language you learned?

which coding language to use and why

ACTIONSCRIPT

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What's the first programming language you learned?

which coding language to use and why

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What's the first programming language you learned?

which coding language to use and why

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What's the first programming language you learned?

which coding language to use and why

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If you could start over, would you choose the same one?

which coding language to use and why

JAVASCRIPT

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Challenges?

which coding language to use and why

Is the language well-designed?
Does it have a robust number of libraries and frameworks?
Does it have good and accessible documentation?
How does it handle errors and are the error messages easy to interpret?
If it’s a new language, it’s a time commitment. Is the squeeze worth the juice? 🍋

WHICH LANGUAGE TO USE? IT DEPENDS!

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Challenges?

which coding language to use and why

What are you trying to accomplish?
What would be the easiest or best environment to set up in your newsroom?
How much community support does the language have if you get stuck?
How much time do you have?
Is the programming language used in the newsroom? Will there be anyone other than yourself to maintain it?
How widely is it used overall? Are there better programming languages that have more of a wide adoption?

WHICH LANGUAGE TO USE? IT DEPENDS!

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Challenges?

which coding language to use and why

THINK OF IT AS LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE

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Which programming language does your newsroom use?

which coding language to use and why

JAVASCRIPT FOR FRONT-END

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Which programming language does your newsroom use?

which coding language to use and why

TEXAS TRIBUNE DATA GRAPHICS KIT

Repo

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Which programming language does your newsroom use?

which coding language to use and why

PYTHON FOR BACKEND

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Which programming language do you use most often in your projects and why?

which coding language to use and why

FOR VISUALS/FRONT-END

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Which programming language do you use most often in your projects and why?

which coding language to use and why

BACKEND

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Which programming language do you use most often in your projects and why?

which coding language to use and why

ANALYSIS

Python - Pandas library in Jupyter notebook

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What’s a great resource for learning how to code?

which coding language to use and why

RESOURCES

Online resources

News Nerdery Slack
Stack Overflow
GitHub

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What’s a great resource for learning how to code?

which coding language to use and why

TIPS

Find a project to work on and code!
Trial and error is okay!
Copy and paste a piece of code AND BREAK IT!

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Nael

What was the first programming language you learned?

What challenges did you face?

Which programming languages does your newsroom primarily use?

Which programming language do you use most often in your projects, and why?

What are some great resources for learning how to code?

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My first programming language

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Challenges - The Loneliness of the Data Journalist

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Challenges - Learning JavaScript by myself

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Your newsroom programming languages?

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Which programming languages do you use?

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Which programming languages do you use?

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Learning how to code? => code-like-a-journalist.com 🤓

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Rapid-fire questions!

Only four possible answers:

👉 Python

👉 R

👉 JavaScript/TypeScript

👉 No-code tools!

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