Welcome! This is the notes page for our third learn-to-code-from-scratch meeting in The Avalon Bar. The plan is to run something like this every two weeks to get people up and running with basic web development and system admin.

Just like last month, I'll spend some time taking anyone new through the basic set up steps. For those that are all set up and ready to go - we'll work on the following:

1. Create a simple quiz page. When you visit it, it chooses a random question from a list you've supplied earlier and asks for the answer in a form then checks if it's correct or not.
2. We'll build this using a simple array to begin with, then switch to getting the information from a database.

Skip through these if you're ready to start directly on the above, otherwise, these are the things we'll do, in order:

1. Setting up an Amazon EC2 instance - once that is complete you now have your own server, and you can securely connect to it using Putty (or directly via Linux/macOS)
2. Setting up your server with Apache and MySQL - the server doesn't have much software installed, just a basic terminal, these steps install Apache (the webserver) and MySQL (the database). At this step we also downloaded Adminer (a GUI to manage the database, similar to PHPMyAdmin).
3. Then we went through the Amazon AWS interface, and set up Security Groups for the webserver (HTTP) - this is basically Amazon's equivalent of a firewall, we had to open a port to allow access to our IP in a web browser
4. Writing your first hello world program - Now we started with our very first simple program.
5. Editing files remotely on the server - Then we looked at ways to connect directly to the server and edit files using Notepad++ (or by mounting a remote directory in Linux/macOS)
6. An example of a basic HTML form - We created a basic HTML form and showed how to access it's elements in PHP once it had been submitted
7. Some example code in PHP to connect to your MySQL server - Some others went ahead and got the PHP code working that connects to a database and pulls data out, though we stopped there as we hadn't actually put data into the database yet - maybe next time!