Jumpstart Lab

WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi "Tech Tuesday"

2012-01-16T15:40:28-05:00

Tuesday 1/17 at noon I’ll join friends Roz Lemioux from Fission Strategy and Ryan Seashore from CodeNow to talk about “learning to program” on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi show. You can listen live at http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2012-01-17/training-where-tech-jobs-are-coding

After the show I’ll update this post with takeaways and notes from the conversation.

The World is Full of Real People

2012-01-13T07:42:21-05:00

Yesterday at CodeMash 2012 in Sandusky, Ohio, I gave a five minute lightning talk about something that’s been in my mind: the developer’s life of priviledge. Here’s the text of my talk:

The World is Full of Real People

You are in a spot of exceptional privilege. You’re well paid to move your fingers around a keyboard. Your greatest danger is probably carpal-tunnel syndrome.

In a time when almost thirty percent of our country is unemployed or underemployed, you make jokes about how annoying recruiters are wanting to offer you job after job. There’s nothing here that’s your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. This isn’t about blame and I’m not saying you should be ashamed of anything.

But you do need to recognize you lead a life of privilege.

We need to do more.

It is easy to write software for other developers. You understand what it’s like to be a developer, so you know exactly how they think and operate. If you want to make quick money, build tools that make developers lives easier.

We can all then form a big circle and pat each other on the back.

Meanwhile, your new testing framework didn’t make any jobs. It didn’t bring significant joy to anyone’s life. In the big scheme of things, you’ve taken your gifts and used them to pleasure yourself.

Let’s take a step back.

Real people don’t use technology, at least not the technology you build. Unless you work at Facebook, the chance of anyone at this hotel having ever heard of your company, much less your product, is slim. Why is that? Why do we build so many things for ourselves?

Because it’s easy.

Solving real problems is hard. Changing real lives is hard. Making real people happy is hard. When we do write things for the public, we find out that those users are “such idiots” – they can never do things properly. “It’s not worth it!”

You wield the power to make amazing change in the world. You can fix problems with a speed and scale that no other industry can match. Your work, once created, can be replicated at almost zero cost. Your power breaks economics, terrifies governments, and endangers the status quo.

Instead of measuring ourselves by the size of our Series A or our average profit per employee, let’s measure in lives changed.

I want to look back and say “I worked harder than I had to. I gave up time with my kids, with my friends, to do what needed to be done. To give back to the rest of the world, to enable them to live just a little bit happier, a little bit better.”

The problems of our world can’t be fixed with software, that’s naive. But they can be fixed by people, and great software helps people do what needs to be done.

As a developer you can only do so much. You don’t understand all the problems, the nuances, the challenges of the world. That’s ok. The people who do understand those challenges are desperate for your help – they’ll tell you everything you need to know. Just ask.

I’m not saying you need to change a thousand lives. But if you could say that you really changed ten, what would that feel like?

You might not ever have a Wikipedia page, but you’d live on in those ten memories – in the lineage of families they start, the kids that grow up happier because their parent is employed, less stressed, or otherwise improved. When you think about generations upon generations, the compound interest on the investment you make in others pays off in the biggest way.

Your software will be forgotten, but true impact never will.

What’s your mark on the earth? Is it big enough, is it deep enough, is it good enough?

Get to work. Thank you.

Hungry Academy is Open Education

2012-01-05T10:46:17-05:00

The developer shortage is a serious problem. Hungry Academy is training developers for LivingSocial, but we’re doing much more than that.

If you want to learn what we’re learning, do what we’re doing – you’re invited.

We’ve always made our tutorials public under Creative Commons licenses, and Hungry Academy will maintain that trend. We’re publishing:

Our classroom tutorials
Our project assignments
Our model programs
The best of our participant’s projects

Cool? It keeps going. As part of the program, the participants will be creating weekly presentations on small topics, in the style of RailsCasts. Those presentations will be live streamed. The best of them will be posted weekly in video form. They’ll also have dedicated time for contributing to the open source, as is standard in the community.

All those things will be open in whatever form appropriate, up on Github, and we’d love your feedback, corrections, and additions. The only limitation on their use is “please don’t start a technical training company using our stuff” - MIT license for code, a CC-attribution-non-commercial license for text.

We’ll be using Ryan Bigg’s Forem for group discussion of projects and general problems/solutions. Most of that will be public, plus we’ll have a dedicated forum for anyone following along with us. You can support each other, and we’ll do our best to pitch in too.

We’re supporting the local DC community, and will host and teach CodeNow classes to expose high school students to the world of programming.

If you’re already a Ruby/Rails developer, we’d love to have you involved with supporting the public community. We’re coordinating one-on-one mentorships internally, and if there’s interest we could likely use the same tools/techniques to match external mentors and learners.

In the end, this is a social agenda. We want to grow the programming community. Join us. If you want to learn, we will make sure you have no excuse.

Of course, applications are still open for the Hungry Academy program itself. They close Monday, January 9th, so don’t delay.

Understanding Our Culture, Part 1

2011-12-30T19:17:19-05:00

As part of the Hungry Academy planning I’m building several reading lists. The one I’m most excited about I named “Culture & Self for Developers.” The Ruby community is special because of the people and their understanding of the world, these are books that explain that ethos.

I’ve joked during conference talks that I’m better at buying books than reading them – and it’s completely true. First up are the ones I’ve actually read:

The Pragmatic Programmer is so classic. It is essential reading for any developer. This was the first programming-related book that I felt a real “connection” to; it shaped the way I think about the profession. Even though it’s twelve years old, the ideas are still current and important. Concepts so heavily emphasized in the Ruby community, like “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and the “Single Responsibility Principle” come out of this book. It’s a text that I’ve wanted to re-read and I can’t wait to discuss it with the program attendees.

The Passionate Programmer is very much a follow-up to The Pragmatic Programmer. I love how Chad Fowler divides the content into short segments that get right to the point. This is the kind of book that you finish and say “that was interesting…but it all felt like common sense.” The ideas aren’t ones that will blow your mind with their complexity or cleverness, they’re just simple and great. They should just be common, but they’re often overlooked.

One of the most exciting parts of Hungry Academy is that both I and the attendees get to spend many days with Chad, trying to make these concepts a part of our daily practice.

Can nine women, together, create a baby in one month? The absurdity of that question is the core of The Mythical Man Month. In software, bigger is not better and it definitely isn’t faster. This book does an excellent job of explaining why scaling programming labor is so difficult. One of the aspects I’m most nervous about with the Hungry Academy class is how to avoid these issues – how to make our team of twenty-four feel like a team of five, then how to integrate the twenty-four into the big engineering team at LivingSocial.

I was in high school when open source software started becoming mainstream in the developer world. As someone enamored with both coding and economics, I devoured books like The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It does an amazing job of explaining why we should care about open versus closed source. The economic and social arguments in this book are eye-opening for people accustomed to economies based on scarcity. When electronic reproduction eliminates the marginal cost of goods, the standard rules go out the window.

The Thank-You Economy, the second book from Gary Vaynerchuk, has stuck with me. The idea I continue to think about is this: in the olden days there were neighborhood businesses. If you give great service to the neighborhood, you’ll build a great reputation. Give crap service to just a few people and you’re reputation disappears, then you’re out of business.

In the 80s and 90s, mass-marketing replaced “word of mouth.” As people moved to the suburbs they stopped talking. Reputations grew through commercials, not genuine experience. All of a sudden, thanks to the Internet, we’re back to being a small, global neighborhood. If you give great service 99 times and crap service once, bet that one person is going to post a review on Yelp and chase your customers away. Genuine feedback once again rules over marketing.

If you ever get the chance to see Gary speak live, take it. This video from RailsConf is only a mediocre substitute.

Last but not least, Daniel Pink’s Drive is so insightful I can’t do it justice. Through my years as a classroom teacher I have significant hands-on experience trying to figure out motivation. Getting a high school freshman to care about their homework more than phone calls with their friends is a significant challenge. Everything I learned over those years aligned perfectly with Pink’s thoughts and research in this book. I especially love how he works in a thread about open source software and what it means for the future.

That’s it for now! The rest of the list is still in my “To Read” stack, but I plan to have them done before the start of Hungry Academy in March. Expect a follow up post with thoughts and highlights, but you can also see the full list on Amazon.

NOTE: Amazon links in this article contain referral keys. This has no effect on the pricing you see, but Jumpstart Lab will earn a small payment from Amazon if you purchase books using the links above. Thanks for your support!

Hungry Academy: JumpstartLab + LivingSocial

2011-12-24T10:30:47-05:00

A few months ago, my friend Chad Fowler, VP of Engineering at LivingSocial, asked “If you could design a program to turn 24 people into excellent developers, what would you do?”

Then I had a long flight, which consisted of furious notes, numbers, projections, schedules, brainstorms – and that would become Hungry Academy.

Our mission is to create a program that’s “better than college.” With five months, two instructors, and the support of an awesome company, we can do it. We’ll be learning full time in a mix of classroom-style tutorials, team projects, individual research/writing/presentation, and giving back to the community.

You can learn more about it on the Hungry Academy website, but don’t slouch – the applications are due in just three weeks! There are many more pieces to this project which will be revealed over the coming months.

Technical Training Wants to Be Free

2011-12-21T13:15:10-05:00

jQuery Air: First Flight, our introduction to jQuery on CodeSchool is now free! Did you know that our text tutorials have always been free under a Creative Commons license?

Technical training resources naturally have a short lifespan, so it only makes sense for them to eventually enter some form of the public domain. The price paid for any knowledge, whether it’s an online course like this or a traditional book, goes to pay for the time invested in creating it, offset some of the time/cost of the author developing the expertise in the first place, and provide seed capital for further material.

Courses like jQuery Air: First Flight cost tens of thousands of dollars to create. But once that cost is paid then keeping materials behind a pay-wall limits their effect while the content is decaying.

Here at JumpstartLab, we believe in “Learning Out Loud” – we want to promote the spread of these skills, regardless of your ability to pay for our classes. To that end, we publish all our tutorials under Creative Commons licenses, allowing individuals to build their own skills for free.

Over the past years we’ve had the tutorials locked up in our CMS, which didn’t make any sense. Now we’re migrating them to Github, using a specialized version of Octopress, and opening up the source to the public. We hope that this setup will allow the community to pitch in and improve the tutorials.

And with our new program, announced in the coming days, expect to see lots of new content hitting the site in 2012.

Blow Up Your Views

2011-12-20T16:28:21-05:00

Rails views have, more or less, stayed exactly the same since 2005. The only thing we’ve changed is the file extension (formerly .rhtml, now .erb). I believe simplifying and improving the view layer is one of the next areas of emphasis for the community.

This past summer I gave a talk entitled “Blow Up Your Views” at several regional Rails conferences including Madison Ruby, Frozen Rails, and NYC.rb / GoRuCo.

You can check out the latest slides on SpeakerDeck or a video from my GoRuCo session below. A later version of the talk from MadisonRuby should be available soon.

Lone Star Ruby Conference 2011

2011-12-19T23:49:49-05:00

LoneStar 2011 just wrapped up here in Austin, Texas. I taught a class in VA on Friday so missed that half, but Saturday was great.

I kicked the day off at 8:45 with the latest iteration of Blow Up Your Views (slides here) which I was really happy with. I got some of my favorite feedback ever:

I was excited to show off more about Draper which I'm really excited about. I finished the presentation with about 8 minutes to go and did a quick code demo. I think the demo was a bit fast for people to understand what was going on, plus it ate up all the time for questions. I need to figure out a better flow before Madison Ruby next week.

After my session I did an interview with Allan Branch from Less Everything and Eric Darnell from Less Films. We talked a bit about the Ruby community and how I got into it. They're putting together for LSRC that should be out soon.

I then caught the second half of Tim Tyrrell's "Testing Javascript with Jasmine." Writing Javascript is challenging for most people (who don't put enough energy into learning the language), and testing it is definitely tough. I'm glad to see a lot of new projects and ideas developing in the space.

After lunch Steve Klabnik started with The Return of Shoes, but it quickly turned into more of a keynote-esque talk about the people of our community. Steve posted We Forget that Open Source is Made of People earlier this week and expounded on those ideas in the talk. It really struck a chord with me. I think the drama about RVM this week got blown out of proportion, but as a community of dreamers we too often step on each other's dreams. We have to find a way to do better.

Following that emotional weight, it was great to dive into Cassandra and scaling tech with Adam Keys' Chronologic. Adam released the project publicly for the first time during the talk. It looks great if you need to deal with activity feed type problems or want an opportunity to play with Cassandra. Later in the Q/A there was discussion about using it to build an "Instagram-in-a-box" whitebox product, which I think has some legs. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone like RailsKits pull it off.

Later the Lightning Talks started off a bit chaotic, but got into gear and had some great 5-minute presentations. It was the first time I've ever seen there be more time than talks, though, and both Avdi and Steve presented twice. I love lightning talks and these didn't disappoint. I also gave a preview of a charity project I will properly launch in about a week.

The day ended with Chad Fowler's keynote about service. Chad must give about 100 keynotes a year around the world and they never disappoint. I always find myself leaving with the motivation to do better. The quote that particularly stuck with me was this (paraphrased):

I've had the opportunity to spend some time with Buddhist monks and they say thank you frequently. Even when someone offends them or does them wrong, they are thankful for the opportunity to exercise forgiveness.

What an idea. I'm currently reading Gary V's The Thank You Economy, and I can't help but feel a theme through the book, Chad's talk, Steve's concerns, and the personal politics our community have wrestled with lately.

Lone Star was a great conference, kudos to organizer Jim Freeze and his team of volunteers. I look forward to returning next year!

Nashville, SF, Seattle and Las Vegas

2011-12-19T23:50:08-05:00

The past week has been busy. On Thursday I presented an updated version of "Fat Model's Aren't Enough" to the Nashville Ruby User Group. There were about 30 developers that came out, a great group! While in town I was surprised to see my friend Obie Fernandez who, along with partner Eliza Brock, has a new startup named RightBonus. Look for it to launch this spring.

Then it was on to San Francisco where I taught a free Ruby Primer in the classroom at Blazing Cloud. They are teaching some awesome classes there, definitely worth checking out if you're in the area.

Saturday and Sunday I taught Rails Jumpstart: Level 1 to a small group over at the GitHub office. It was a great class and we enjoyed hanging out in the space, especially when I (finally) got to play some RockBand.

Monday if was off to Seattle for another Ruby Primer hosted by our friends at Blue Box Group. The turnout was great; we had trouble fitting everyone in.

Then Wednesday I headed for Las Vegas and presented "Fat Models Aren't Enough" to the Las Vegas Ruby Users Group. I've been to the LVRUG twice now, and they're a really small but extremely friendly group. They meet twice a month, so whenever I'm in town I try to stop by.

The world tour continues!

Presentation at AZ::Ruby

2011-12-19T23:50:33-05:00

Last night I gave a "preview" of my upcoming "Fat Models Aren't Enough" talk. I'm tuning the direction and content, but overall got really positive feedback.

One my my favorite comments was "This is the first example of a presenter that I haven't hated." Hah!

If you're interested, check out the PDF here.