Coding United July Digest

Growing and Club Special Elections

Author

Jose de Lima
July 04, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

🌟 Editor's Note
Welcome to the beginning of the Coding United Digest, this will be aimed to cover the club meeting notes and other important dates!

Club details can be found in the GitHub.

Want to Join? Club Membership Form

Club Meetings Room: https://bit.ly/CodingUnitedMeetingRoom

Club Monthly July Meeting: LINK

Take Aways / Todos based on converations and meetings

  • Existing Board Members:

    • Jose de Lima: President

    • Kailey Northham: Vice President

  • Special Elections Results:

    • Chris Thelus: Event Coordinator

    • Raina Goding: Engagement Officer

    • Tony Davis: Secretary

  • Club Appointments:

    • Bryton Sarrel: Game Server project lead

    • Erica Boterf: Social Outreach officer

  • Create Video / training guide on how to setup a VMs

  • Coding challenge needs automated scripts to test completion level or a comittee this needs to be put in place prior to next coding challenge

🗓️ Upcoming Events

CU Monthly Meeting

07/20/2025 1:00pm est

  • Annouce results of elections and welcome new board members (if any)

  • Discuss current structure and plans for the club

  • Officially appoint unelected club officers (if any)

Intro to Programming - Meeting

07/21/2025 8:30pm est

  • Asynchronous learning course to participate: Python Course

  • Reviewing Lessons 3 & 4:

    • Lesson 3: Control Statements

    • Lesson 4: Functions

🛠️ Current Club Activities

📚 Book Club

Currently reading: The Object-Oriented Thought Process (5th Ed)
Get it free with your SNHU account: https://go.oreilly.com/SHNU (use your SNHU email)

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is the foundation of modern programming languages, including C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic .NET, Ruby, Objective-C, and Swift. Objects also form the basis for many web technologies such as JavaScript, Python, and PHP.

It is of vital importance to learn the fundamental concepts of object orientation before starting to use object-oriented development environments. OOP promotes good design practices, code portability, and reuse–but it requires a shift in thinking to be fully understood. Programmers new to OOP should resist the temptation to jump directly into a particular programming language or a modeling language, and instead first take the time to learn what author Matt Weisfeld calls “the object-oriented thought process.”

🎮Game Server Initiative

Minecraft game server

Intro to Programming with Python

🌐 Club Project – Website

⚙️ Coding Challenges

Career information

We’ve shared valuable career information on our GitHub, including project tasks and the programming languages you should be proficient in to succeed in specific roles.

Now, we're taking it a step further by inviting professionals from various industries to share insights on what to focus on and how to land your first job.

Meetings:

🚀 Coming Soon

  • Project 3 - Data Analysis project (still being brainstormed)

  • Project 4 - Intro to Video game development (searching for project lead)

Did You Know? In February 2018, GitHub, the world's largest code hosting platform, accidentally took itself offline for hours. The root cause? A small typo during routine maintenance of their database infrastructure.

💥 What happened?

GitHub engineers were migrating one of their MySQL databases. To remove an old replica server, an engineer ran a script, except they accidentally ran it against the wrong server, the primary production database. Whoops.

The script contained a command to remove a database replica: 

DROP DATABASE ...

😬 The fallout:

  • GitHub services (pull requests, issues, repos) were partially or fully down for multiple hours.

  • They had to rebuild everything from backups and logs.

  • Public trust took a hit for a while especially ironic for a company trusted by millions of developers.

💡 The takeaway:

Even the biggest, most technically advanced companies are vulnerable to human error, sometimes it’s not a bad deploy, but a simple slip like targeting the wrong server.

This incident is now used as a case study in DevOps and SRE circles on why:

  • Automation needs safeguards

  • Production vs. staging environments must be clearly separated

  • Redundancy and backups are critical

Coding United Digest