vdavez/codingforlawyers

Ready or Not...

👋 I'm Dave Z! My pronouns are he/him, and I'm based out of Oregon, WI.

codingforlawyers's Issues

"Challenge Bank"

One reader suggested a set of "challenges" for readers who want to practice what they learn. I think this is a fabulous idea, and have started a wiki page. Thanks @colarusso!

Contributions

I'm a programmer with an interest in typography and web design. Despite not having any background in law, I really like this website and I'd love to show it to my father (a lawyer) when it's more polished and complete.

Are you looking for contributions? As someone with no law experience, is there anything I can do to help?

Fixup regex example

So, unfortunately [1-52] matches a character class instead of numbers, and a better solution is kind of convoluted. @konklone has far more regex wizard skills than I do and may know of a fix.

License Project

The project asks for pull requests, but is licensed as a source-disclosed work ( ©️ in footer). If you would like contributes, perhaps consider licensing the project under a CC license, such as CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC?

Chapter Idea: Distributed Version Control Software -- How to Use Git and Github

See title; There are many existing good guides that should probably just be pointed to, but there's still some room to explain the concepts to the legal mind.

chapter idea: hardware and bits

This isn't strictly coding, but I think if we're going to educate lawyers about computers we should consider teaching them about hardware basics such as:

• what's the difference between a hard drive, ram and CPU buffers?
• how is everything actually a one or zero?
• how does a CPU work?
• how is a signal sent on a wire?
• encodings as the translation between the letters and binary.
• etc.

Basic thinking is two fold:

1. Lots of people find computers to be magic, and this is the bridge that spans that gap.
2. In any law involving computers, for example copyright, basic understandings like this dictate whether the law was broken (e.g. was a copy made of that MP3?)

I think a chapter like this could be simplified sufficiently to make it work.

Chapter Idea: "Bad" File Formats

Why you should avoid creating:

• PDFs
• Word docs
• [your hated file format here]

Chapter Idea: Command Line Basics

Probably shouldn't be legal/lawyer-specific, but rather than linking to an outside resource, it'd be nice to intro just enough to make the rest of the chapters easier.

Marginalia in Markdown were not transformed

As a developer and law undergraduate, it's really nice to bump into a project dedicated to lawyers. 😃

A quick browse through chapter 2 would notice several margin headers not transformed and were left intact. Probably a misconfigured parser caused the issue?

License Confirmation

As @konklone notes, I should really get a 👍 from the following: @compleatang, @tmcw, @kirschsubjudice, @underyx, @benbalter, @djfdat, @adelevie, and @snoldak924 for licensing their contributions to this project under a CC-BY-NC-4.0 license.

If you could 👍 that would be excellent!

Meanwhile, wow it's so great to have contributions from all of you.

Roadmap

Love this!

I'm definitely interested in contributing some chapters (I love the idea of teaching people coding and have been way behind on updating my blog posts on the subject (http://blog.davidbrownman.com/post/64233112932/what-the-hell-is-a-python)).

Going forward, it seems like you (as our fearless leader) should provide a few resources (or we should discuss what we want to do):

• An overall goal/endpoint
• Table of contents so we can begin to move towards that goal
• Keeping issues maintained (I noticed there are a few issues that are resolved but not closed- a clean repo is a happy repo!)

This seems like a great project though and I'm excited to dive into it.

Use Headers Semanticly

Digging into the markdown, it seems there's a habit of using headers (#, ##, etc.) to make content bold or stand out (e.g., a "next chapter" link), rather than using headings semantically, to provide hierarchy and structure to the content.

In general:

• The site title should be an H1, the largest thing on the page and the overarching title of the content
• The document title (e.g., chapter title) should be an H2, the second least specific thing on the page
• Content should be H3+, with nested headings as appraise
• Headings should not be used for navigational elements

Chapter Idea: Git and GitHub

Many lawyers are already on GitHub!

You can use your newly-acquired Markdown skills on GitHub.

GitHub is for documents.

You get diffs* for free.

GitHub is for code.

It's really all just git and GitHub.

• I'm working on diff chapter.