Zen and the Art of Programming

On the Usability of Codecademy

2012-01-16T17:09:21Z

I asked a friend of mine (who isn’t a coder) if she could try out the amazing Codecademy for me.

She is a smart person, but again, she isn’t a programmer. I thought Codecademy would be a great way to introduce her to programming for the web. As a programmer, I thought it was extremely well made and assumed it would work for anyone.

She landed on the homepage and read the instructions.

She wrote her name (“Elizabeth”), then decided however to change it to the shortened form of her name, “Liz”. To do so she highlighted the whole string she had just typed and tried to press the backspace key to delete it. The whole page disappeared and the browser redirected her to the new tab.

Liz: “Why did it do that?”

Me: “You can’t highlight a word like you’d do in Microsoft Word. You’re in a browser, so the backspace button tells the browser to go back to the previous page you visited in that particular tab. You need to delete the string one letter at the time.”

She reopened the page and tried again, this time things were successful.

Next, she had to measure the length of her name. But she forgot the quotes, so she got this:

Liz: “What happened?”

Me: “What do you think happened?”

Liz: “Some kind of error, but what does ‘Liz is not defined’ mean?”

Me: “You accidentally forgot the quotes.”

Liz: “Oh, OK, let me try again.”

She wrote the first quote but pressed enter before immediately realizing she had forgotten the closing one. As such she encountered the following scenario:

Liz: “I messed it, let me try again.”

Liz: “I typed it right this time, why didn’t it work?”

Me: “Since you didn’t close the first string, it thinks that the second line is still part of the first command. Do you know how to get out of this?”

Liz: “No, but let me try.”

No, she didn’t close the string and pressed enter twice or deleted a bunch of characters (this web REPL allows it, kudos to Codecademy). She simply reloaded the page. Thankfully the same exercise (#1) was reloaded. After completing it successfully though, instead of exercise #2, exercise #0 reappeared, asking her to enter her first name again.

After raising an eyebrow at that point, she went along with it. Next she was asked to try some math.

She can’t be faulted for thinking that “for instance” meant she could try something else. Yet, she got an “Oops, try again.” message.

At that point I suspended this tiny hallway test and I asked her what she thought of this system. She found the site to be a bit unintuitive, but above all felt like she didn’t know how to get unstuck when she made an error.

Now, before you all jump in and tell me that my friend is dumb, that she’ll never be a programmer, or that you can’t idiot-proof a design, keep in mind the very point of this post.

Usability is hard because real users use our UIs and software in different and unexpected ways. Codecamedy did a very good job, but even they left plenty of room for improvement. As web developers it’s our duty to give usability and user experience a significant amount of attention. The UI is the software to the end user.

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The Strange Case of John Dillinger and the Fraudulent Apple ID

2012-01-12T20:47:27Z

I suspect someone, somewhere has managed to find a way to create Apple IDs from email IDs they don’t have access to. The following is what leads me to believe this may be the case.

This morning I received the following email starting with “Dear John Dillinger, Welcome to the Apple Online Store”.

Four odd facts about this email:

My name is not the same as that of an infamous 1930s criminal (John Dillinger).
I never signed up for Apple’s services with that particular (old) email account (antonio@*******.it).
The email isn’t phishing; it arrived from Apple, and the links are all legitimate Apple.com links.
Plenty of other people have reported having the same thing happen to them.

OK, so what? Somebody hacked my old email address, right? Well, possibly, but let’s not jump to conclusions quite that quickly.

This old email account of mine runs via Google Apps for Business; it uses an extremely strong password (30+ random characters), and shows no signs of having been accessed by other people or IP addresses in the Google details for the account. No DNS changes have been made either at a domain level. I’m not claiming that it wasn’t hacked, but there aren’t strong signs to suggest as much.

I logged into the inbox for this account and noticed that Apple had only sent the one welcome email. When you signup for an Apple ID, you are supposed to receive an email confirmation link. I received none (unless the account was actually hacked and the person deleted every trace of such email). Odd.

I requested a password reset for that account, and in turn Apple sent me the link. I reset the password and was able to log in. The email address resulted as being verified. Furthermore, no details were present in the account other than the fake name (again, John Dillinger), my old email address, and US being listed as the country (I’m in Canada, not the States). This is strange because normally you can’t register an Apple ID without providing information such as your address, a security question, and your date of birth.

Two possibilities jump to mind:

The malicious individual managed to find a way to create Apple IDs by using scraped email addresses (but without the actual need to have access to those inboxes).
The malicious individual has gained access to third party email addresses.

I say scraped because even open source mailing lists have been receiving such emails.

Even in the second case, they still managed to register an Apple ID without providing any details to Apple. I can imagine this happening due to one of the Apple Store bugs or something along those lines, rather than the web interface.

Either way, I’m pretty certain it is not something Apple wants to have happen or find desirable. If you were able to do this, it would be fairly trivial and not overly time consuming to create lots of fake, but legittimate looking, accounts to boost the reviews of an app or other nefarious purposes. No need to even pay those $0.15 to microworkers to create fake accounts.

When I called Apple – flu, cough and fever be damned – they told me that I should reset the password (which I had already done). I asked if they could ban or delete the fraudulent account. The customer service agent on the line told me that they won’t do that and that I can’t delete the account myself.

So I, and presumably many other people like me, will be left wondering if “John Dillinger” has a trick up his sleeve to reset the Apple ID password himself or otherwise manage to control and use an account that is associated with one of my email addresses. The idea that Apple is OK with having fraudulent, unaccountable accounts like that is pretty absurd. We’ll see if this post helps clarify and perhaps fix the issue.

Possibly related posts:

A Big List of Interesting Programming Books Released in 2011

2011-12-16T19:16:08Z

The following is a list of 48 interesting programming books that were released in 2011. While technically some of them are only programming-related and not about coding per se, each one is sure to be of interest to some programmers.

As some of you know, I run a service called Any New Books?, which emails you a list of new books that are related to the categories of your choice each week. For the most part I pulled this list from the weekly staff picks there throughout this past year, just in time for your Christmas shopping.

The books are ordered by their current sale rank on Amazon (from the most popular to the least popular at the moment, with hardcovers first). I hope this page will help you discover a few titles you may have not have noticed yet.

[Mathematics book list]

	The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Stores: USA \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By James Gleick ISBN: 0375423729 Publisher: Pantheon Publication date: March 1, 2011 Binding: Hardcover Estimated price: $16.82 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-4A Boxed Set Stores: USA \| Canada By Donald E. Knuth ISBN: 0321751043 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: March 13, 2011 Binding: Hardcover Estimated price: $190.47 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Algorithms (4th Edition) Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne ISBN: 032157351X Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: March 19, 2011 Binding: Hardcover Estimated price: $59.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1 Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Donald E. Knuth ISBN: 0201038048 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: January 22, 2011 Binding: Hardcover Estimated price: $53.15 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	GPU Computing Gems Emerald Edition Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Editors at Morgan Kaufmann ISBN: 0123849888 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publication date: February 7, 2011 Binding: Hardcover Estimated price: $29.06 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Nathan Yau ISBN: 0470944889 Publisher: Wiley Publication date: July 20, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $20.48 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Programming Android Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Zigurd Mednieks, Laird Dornin, G. Blake Meike, Masumi Nakamura ISBN: 1449389694 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: August 5, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $22.98 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Activate Your Web Pages Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By David Flanagan ISBN: 0596805527 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: May 10, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $27.48 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (2nd Edition) Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Joe Conway, Aaron Hillegass ISBN: 0321773772 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: July 2, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $26.95 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Programming in Objective-C, Third Edition Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Stephen G. Kochan ISBN: 0321711394 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: June 20, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $25.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (4th Edition) Stores: USA \| Canada \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Aaron Hillegass, Adam Preble ISBN: 0321774086 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: November 19, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $27.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Introducing HTML5 (2nd Edition) Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Bruce Lawson, Remy Sharp ISBN: 0321784421 Publisher: New Riders Press Publication date: October 28, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $14.49 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Programming Python Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Mark Lutz ISBN: 0596158106 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: January 7, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $36.42 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Beginning Android Application Development Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Wei-Meng Lee ISBN: 1118017110 Publisher: Wrox Publication date: April 19, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $15.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Agile Web Development with Rails Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson ISBN: 1934356549 Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf Publication date: March 31, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $22.36 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Eloquent Ruby Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Russ Olsen ISBN: 0321584104 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: February 21, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $24.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Matlab, Second Edition: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Stormy Attaway ISBN: 0123850819 Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann Publication date: August 11, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $35.44 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Java Performance Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Charlie Hunt, Binu John ISBN: 0137142528 Publisher: Prentice Hall Publication date: October 10, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $40.73 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham ISBN: 1449397670 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: August 19, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $14.34 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!: A Beginner’s Guide Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Miran Lipovaca ISBN: 1593272839 Publisher: No Starch Press Publication date: April 18, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $21.55 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Supercharged JavaScript Graphics: with HTML5 canvas, jQuery, and More Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Raffaele Cecco ISBN: 1449393632 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: August 2, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $21.31 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Arduino Robotics Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By John-David Warren, Josh Adams, Harald Molle ISBN: 1430231831 Publisher: Apress Publication date: July 14, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $26.38 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	HBase: The Definitive Guide Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Lars George ISBN: 1449396100 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: September 20, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $24.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications Stores: USA \| Canada \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Michal Zalewski ISBN: 1593273886 Publisher: No Starch Press Publication date: November 26, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $26.50 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	MongoDB in Action Stores: USA By Kyle Banker ISBN: 1935182870 Publisher: Manning Publications Publication date: December 16, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $27.46 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Programming Pig Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Alan Gates ISBN: 1449302645 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: October 20, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $24.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	The Python Standard Library by Example Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Doug Hellmann ISBN: 0321767349 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: June 11, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $31.49 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	The Joy of Clojure: Thinking the Clojure Way Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Michael Fogus, Chris Houser ISBN: 1935182641 Publisher: Manning Publications Publication date: April 4, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $21.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Xcode 4 Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Richard Wentk ISBN: 111800759X Publisher: Wiley Publication date: June 28, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $19.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Programming Amazon EC2 Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Jurg van Vliet, Flavia Paganelli ISBN: 1449393683 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: March 14, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $24.22 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Mark Dalrymple ISBN: 0321706250 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: August 28, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $32.95 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	CUDA Application Design and Development Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Rob Farber ISBN: 0123884268 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publication date: November 14, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $43.98 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Sinatra: Up and Running Stores: USA \| Canada \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Alan Harris, Konstantin Haase ISBN: 1449304230 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: December 1, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $15.29 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Jurgen Appelo ISBN: 0321712471 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: January 7, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $29.50 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Professional NoSQL Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Shashank Tiwari ISBN: 047094224X Publisher: Wrox Publication date: September 13, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $16.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher ISBN: 0321753887 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: May 15, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $16.96 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Programming Concurrency on the JVM: Mastering Synchronization, STM, and Actors Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Venkat Subramaniam ISBN: 193435676X Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf Publication date: September 2, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $19.29 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Learning HTML5 Game Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building Online Games Using Canvas, SVG, and WebGL Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By James L. Williams ISBN: 0321767365 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: October 5, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $16.54 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, Second Edition: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Dean Allemang, James Hendler ISBN: 0123859654 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publication date: June 3, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $38.43 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Brave NUI World: Designing Natural User Interfaces for Touch and Gesture Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Daniel Wigdor, Dennis Wixon ISBN: 0123822319 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publication date: April 27, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $18.49 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (3rd Edition) Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Simon Thompson ISBN: 0201882957 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: October 2, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $44.96 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Think Stats Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Allen B. Downey ISBN: 1449307116 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: July 22, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $21.98 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Rails 3 in Action Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Ryan Bigg, Yehuda Katz ISBN: 1935182277 Publisher: Manning Publications Publication date: September 28, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $27.48 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Test Driven Development for Embedded C Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By James W. Grenning ISBN: 193435662X Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf Publication date: May 2, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $19.37 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	MacRuby: The Definitive Guide: Ruby and Cocoa on OS X Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Matt Aimonetti ISBN: 1449380379 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Publication date: November 4, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $16.70 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Modern Information Retrieval: The Concepts and Technology behind Search (2nd Edition) Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy By Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto ISBN: 0321416910 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Publication date: February 10, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $56.24 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Greg Nudelman ISBN: 0470942231 Publisher: Wiley Publication date: May 24, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $14.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook
	Windows Phone 7 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach Stores: USA \| UK \| Canada \| Italy \| Kindle \| UK Kindle By Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati, Emanuele Garofalo ISBN: 1430233710 Publisher: Apress Publication date: May 26, 2011 Binding: Paperback Estimated price: $22.99 Share this book on Twitter \|Facebook

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Download DB2 Express-C 9.7.5

2011-11-21T20:56:56Z

IBM recently released a new edition of DB2 Express-C, the free edition of their powerful commercial database. You can grab DB2 Express-C 9.7.5 for Linux, Unix, and Windows here.

This new version includes support for Oracle compatibility (which was previously only available for commercial editions), and a few other features, including an enhanced db shell known as CLP+.

If you downloaded DB2 in the past, take this new edition for a spin and let us know what you think. If you haven’t, now would be a great time to try out DB2 Express-C in its enhanced incarnation.

It’s entirely free of charge and there are no limits on the amount of data you can store in development, testing, or production.

In a future post I will also explain why, contrary to what some may believe, it’s an excellent choice for startups that are looking for a solution that goes beyond the relational paradigm.

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The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game

2011-11-10T15:23:16Z

For a long time now Italy has been experiencing political and economical turmoil that would require several drastic changes in order to reboot it. Italy needs a new class of politicians who truly care about the real problems that the country and its people are facing everyday. It desperately needs to reform the educational, tax, and labour systems, as well as a substantial reduction of bureaucracy at every level.

In his famous 1961 inaugural speech John F. Kennedy said to his fellow American citizens, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. In the same spirit I can’t help but ask myself, what would it take to modernize and restart Italy?

Though easy solutions do not abound, there is something that young Italians can do to greatly help this situation: create startups. Over the past 30 years American startups have generated 44 million jobs. Starting a company is perhaps the most noble act Italians can do to improve their country and their own economical condition, while at the same time helping to create jobs for their fellow Italians.

I know that starting a company is not an easy or straightforward process in Italy. Doing so means facing a labyrinth of laws (plus very high taxes). The fiscal system is inefficient and often rewards tax evaders with a laissez-faire attitude, while showing a cruel persistence against honest small business owners.

It’s also hard because there are virtually no angel investors or venture capitalists. Though parents are sometimes seen as angel investors (of sorts), to some, for providing young Italians with a place to stay rent-free well into their twenties and sometimes even thirties.

The existence of obstacles shouldn’t be a good enough reason to prevent you from trying at all though. When you have very little to lose, because you’re already unemployed (or are not making anywhere near enough to get by), why not try and start something of your own? It’s obvious that without an initial capital, funds, or credit you can’t launch a physical retail outlet or start having goods manufactured for you in China.

Thanks to the web however, it’s possible to bootstrap a company and encounter relatively negligible monthly costs. The only real capital required is knowledge, which is freely obtainable online, paired with the ability to work both diligently and smartly towards a goal.

With rampant unemployment in Italy, particularly in the south, one would expect a huge surge of technical startups in Italy. You’d imagine people staying up until 3 AM in order to fulfil their dream of running their own business. Sadly, these are not the droids you are looking for. Unemployment figures are appalling, yet there are very few self-employed people or entrepreneurs to be found throughout the country.

The real limit is the mentality that most young Italians have.

Risk aversion. Even when there is very little to lose and you’re 20-25 years old and without a family of your own to sustain yet.

Recently a great deal of people from all over the world applied to temporary leave their respective countries to go to Chile, in order to create a startup and take advantage of a $40,000 fund for startups that the country is offering without any strings attached. Americans jumped at the occasion, despite the availability of local funds. How many Italians have gone so far? Very, very few. And yet they are the ones who could truly use – and need to avail of – chances like this.

Fear of failure. Italian society has never come to terms with the fact that failing is an opportunity to grow and try again. If you fail once in Italy, you are often seen as a failure forever (short of doing amazingly well later in life).

In North America it’s pretty much established that statistically you’ll fail a few times before getting it right. Nobody would attach such a negative label to you because you tried to create something of value and didn’t end up succeeding. You’ll be respected far more than timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Real experts are usually people who have failed more than most people and have learned important lessons in doing so. This is true in any field, not just the business world.

Sense of self-entitlement. People in Italy still expect to obtain a long term post office or government job where you’re unlikely to get fired and will remain there for 40 years, just because they got a college degree.

I’ve interviewed several Italian job applicants throughout my life, and it’s not unusual to see them become visibly upset when a fellow Italian wouldn’t hire them over someone from a different country (simply on the merits that we’re both from Italy) – even when they’ve never written a single line of code outside of their university courses.

Fatalism. In Italy there is the belief that your future doesn’t depend on your own efforts, rather that it’s mostly influenced by impregnable external forces. When you are not convinced that you can take charge of your life, it becomes really hard to make the sacrifices and jump through the hoops required to achieve success.

Why work like a dog if you don’t believe in your heart that you can change your life and live the Italian take on the American dream? (I refuse to believe that the real Italian dream is to become a soccer player or a show girl, or to have a unionized job where you can’t get fired no matter how bad you behave.)

The following chart shows the results of some research that was carried out by the the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As you can see, many Americans, Swedish, and English people replied “no” to the question, “Does success depend on forces outside our control?”. Italians however showed their fatalism, with more than 70% replying “yes”.

(By the way, tip of the hat to Fabrizio Capobianco for spotting this image on a slide by Richard Boly.)

I understand that as a whole a strongly catholic country may hold onto the popular belief that everything comes down to “God willing”, and that in many fields corruption and nepotism are the norm, not the exception. However it must be really sad to live a life in which you don’t believe in your ability to change your own destiny. Real change often derives from the ambition and desire to improve one’s situation in life.

Cynicism and envy. In Italy, people tend to ridicule, envy, or be distrustful of those who actively want to create a better future for themselves or to change the status quo.

When Mashape’s founders wrote an open letter to the Italian tech community in which they suggested that they were leaving Italy for Silicon Valley, people mocked them to no end. Many derided them and said they’d be back in a year with their tails between their legs and nothing to show for leaving Italy. What actually happened (as non-Italians might expect) is that they received $1.5 million from some of the largest investors in America, and in the process were able to get more investors to pay attention to wannabe Italian entrepreneurs.

This story speaks of a generation of cynics and discouraged people who not only struggle to produce something of value themselves, but who also actively sabotage others so as not to look incapable or lazy by comparison.

Overall Italians are a smart and (in the technical field) a generally talented group of people. Perhaps Italy will never have its own Silicon Valley, but it has a huge amount of human potential that should be put to good use. Change and innovation in my native country must start from the ground up, beginning with the attitudes and belief system of its youth.

I urge fellow Italians to fight these negative tendencies and stop, once for all, looking for excuses. If you wait for the ideal conditions to come along, you’ll never achieve anything important in life.

All change requires is for people to start taking action and trying for real. After all, just look around at the way Italy is these days: you don’t have a lot to lose. Yet there is so very much to potentially gain in the fight to reshape and transform Italy into the country it truly deserves to be.

[An Italian version of this article is available on Stacktrace.]

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Requiem for a Dreamer

2011-10-12T05:47:05Z

Steve Jobs passed away a week ago.

When I first learned about it, I cried. That was an odd reaction on my part. I never met or interacted with Steve Jobs and I’m not what most would define as an Apple fanboy.

I reflected upon what led me to shed tears for someone who was, technically, a stranger to me and came to realize that Steve Jobs affected and inspired my life far more that I cared to admit.

My deep sadness wasn’t just for a relatively young person who died and left a grieving family behind. It was sadness for the loss of a visionary leader who relentlessly showed us the art of what’s possible. I couldn’t help but feel the sudden end of an era. No “one more thing” left to anticipate with excitement and curiosity.

Steve didn’t personally create or invent many of Apple’s products, but he ensured that the end results we managed to get our hands on were nothing short of inspiring. He was a visionary for countless consumers, developers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors.

He managed to inspire a whole industry, while doing what he truly loved. Millions of entrepreneurs world wide have been inspired to do the same as a result of his work. This may be his greatest legacy and something that will live on in all of us long after his passing.

Goodbye, Steve, and thank you for everything.

Credit: Matt Yohe

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The Hadoop Programming Challenge Has Been Extended

2011-10-05T16:03:04Z

In the past I’ve mentioned the Hadoop Programming Challenge, which is organized by Big Data University. After quickly registering and taking a free online course on Hadoop, you have the option to use your newly acquired skills to participate in a programming challenge.

The submission deadline has been extended to Monday, October 10th, 11:59pm PST, so there’s still time for you participate, if you wish.

Three participants will be selected for an all-paid trip to IOD in Las Vegas three weeks from now. You don’t have to be a student to participate; professionals and hobbyists are more than welcome to take part, too.

The extension has been granted thanks to the unprecedented level of interest, with almost 2,000 people taking the course (many of whom asked for an extension).

You can take the course and not participate in the challenge, but participating is a good chance to put your knowledge to the test when it comes to solving a real world problem of your choice.

The submissions received so far have been very interesting, and include topics spanning from global warming to calculations on the cup size of fashion models.

If you can think of an application for which MapReduce technology is able find insightful answers amongst a large dataset, consider taking the challenge. Who knows, you might just land yourself a trip to Vegas!

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My Technical Blogging Book Is Now Available in Beta

2011-09-21T14:42:36Z

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise into a Remarkable Online Presence is now available in beta. This first beta includes about 200 of the estimated total 250 pages. Most of the information you need to know is already included in the existing chapters.

Early feedback has been great and helped shape the book. The reception by early readers and reviewers has been nothing short of incredible. Here is one:

My career got a huge boost when I got serious about blogging, two years ago. So I’m in absolute awe at this amazing book, going above and beyond the best advice I’ve ever heard on the subject. I wish I would have read this two years ago, as I had to learn this the hard way. Honestly, this book has got me inspired to get back to writing more.
—Derek Sivers, founder, CD Baby, sivers.org

I’m pretty confident, humbly, that you’ll love it. It provides you with all the info you really need to succeed with your own blog, and it does so in an organized manner that will get you to plan, build, promote, benefit from, and grow your own blog.

While useful to a general audience, the book was specifically written for developers and technically minded entrepreneurs (e.g., hackers and founders). Above all, it aims to be a practical book packed with actionable advice, and not your typical fluffy book about blogging.

You can buy the beta here, and please let me know what you think about it once you get around to read it. I’m very excited to be able to share the fruits of much hard work that took most of my evenings and weekends for the past few months.

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Mobile Development Marketshare Among Hacker News’ Participants

2011-09-20T21:32:39Z

Yesterday I ran a poll amongst Hacker News participants in which I asked them to indicate which mobile platforms they develop for. Here are the results for the first 24 hours, in chart format, of that poll. Keep in mind that participants were allowed to select more than one platform if they develop for more than one.

I’m very much impressed by the number of people developing for Android. Not far off from iOS. I also find it remarkable that Windows Phone has more developers, among this particular group of developers, than BlackBerry OS.

This isn’t a scientific survey in any way, but nevertheless it gives us an interesting insight into the world of mobile development.

What are your thoughts? Is there anything that surprises you about these results?

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Learn Hadoop and Get a Chance to Go to Vegas

2011-09-09T15:48:41Z

This is a heads up for my readers who are interested in Big Data. Follow these steps to learn Hadoop and get a chance to win a trip to Las Vegas:

Register with Big Data University.
Enroll and complete the free Hadoop Fundamentals I course.
You’ll receive a certificate of completion and an invitation to partecipate in the first Hadoop Programming Challenge.
On October 3rd, three participants to this challenge will be selected for a free, all expenses paid, trip to Information on Demand (IOD) 2011 in Las Vegas on October 23rd – 27th.

Best of luck to you.

(Hat tip to Free DB2)

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