Thoughts on Code Year, Codecademy, and Learning to Code

By going one click away from this post you’ll see that I’ve spent the last twelve years writing books specifically geared to the newbie coder—be it someone who wants to learn the markup language of HTML, the style sheet language of CSS, the query language for relational database systems, the client-side programming language of JavaScript, or the server-side programming language of PHP (or, in fact, all of them together). As I wrote a few weeks ago, learning from tech books is not dead. But it’s not the only way to learn; straight up learning from a book doesn’t work for everyone, and certainly not every tech book pays attention to pedagogy (I do, with the help of all of my editors who keep me honest).

Then again, neither does every online learning environment. Do any?

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My Great Hope for 2012

pills!NOTE! Although of course my hope for 2012 include world peace and the defeat of both SOPA and PIPA, this is not that kind of blog post….

My hope for 2012 is to continue to hurtle toward old-person-ness with Rachel. Seriously, you’d think we were each 68 years old instead of just having a combined age of 68.

To wit, we:
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Spend a Buck & Read “The Professor’s Assassin”

Have a spare buck in your pocket? Allow me to recommend Matthew Pearl’s dramatization of “The Shocking Campus Shooting in Virginia You Never Heard Of”. This long short story/short novella (you can argue which it is among yourselves) is set in 1840, on the grounds of the University of Virginia. On November 12 of that year, the dean of the faculty was shot—and later died—after attempting to quell a student-led disturbance on the Lawn (it’s true). The true story itself is interesting, but as usual with Pearl’s books both his characterizations and the locale are richly described and the tale told well.

I thoroughly enjoyed Pearl’s work, despite being in the perfect position to nitpick it to death since I work on Grounds and have held in my hands and read original accounts of the shooting and John Davis’s death courtesy of the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library. But there’s no nitpicking from me—just praise, and the fervent desire that you all go take that dollar that’s been burning a hole in your pocket and spend it on this story.

While reading “The Professor’s Assassin” (available as a download from Amazon and numerous other outlets) you’ll be introduced to one William Barton Rogers, the future founder of MIT. This tidbit is important, as the novella is a prequel to The Technologists, a novel that focuses on the first class of students at MIT and, well, a fictional, yet historically-grounded, mystery. Intrigued? The book has its own trailer…and it’s about science and technology…in the nineteenth century. What’s not to love?

sort of interesting note: Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club was one of the only books I read for pleasure during my PhD work in c19 American Lit.

Tech Books: Not Dead!

As someone who has made a decent secondary income for the last twelve years writing technical books, a recent post in the SD Times caught my eye: “Are tech books dead?” it asks. The author comes to the conclusion that no, they’re not, although the rise of blogs and other online material certainly plays a role for learners more than it has in the past. I agree with this conclusion, which itself isn’t interesting, but that this is the conclusion still in 2011—almost 2012—is interesting to me (and it supports my desire to keep on writing books).

I started writing technical books in 1999; I wrote the second PHP-related book that came on the market (for Prima-Tech which became part of Course Technology which became part of Cenage, if you’re interested), and from that point on I was solicited to write some more, eventually writing only for Pearson and putting out an edition or two of something or another each year.

I never thought I’d still be doing this a decade later. As a developer myself, I knew how I learned new things in the ever-changing tech landscape, and it isn’t from technical books. I thought “who on earth would pick up a chunky ol’ book and sit it next to their computer while working on something?” … my choice of “thickbook.com” as my domain name was meant to be funny, like “here are Thick Books From Which You Shall Learn Things” (tongue firmly in cheek). The joke’s on me, because that income has increased or remained steady each year; there’s been no noticeable drop-off in either the number of sales of my books, the purchase of rights for translation, or the amount I’ve earned in royalties.

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What’s Next?

I don’t really know.

I haven’t blogged much in the past year, but several months ago I wrote a blog post about what I do in my job at University of Virginia Library. All of that is now “what I did,” because I’ve resigned from that position effective the end of the year.

I’m not going to detail the reasons; you can chalk it up to philosophical differences in terms of technical focus, personnel, and institutional organization (and its resulting inertia). These are not unique to UVa or its Library.

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Selected ProfHacker Posts (from the archives)

From August 2009 to October 2010, I wrote almost 100 blog posts for (and was the managing editor of) ProfHacker, a blog hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education and providing tips about teaching, technology, and productivity.

Here are links to some of my favorite posts from those times…including their dates of publication so you can take some of the content (and the links found within) with a grain of salt—internet time races on, and all that.

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This is What I Do

The other day I wrote up a “it’s June 1st, sounds like a good time for a quick status update” email for my bosses, and in doing so stepped back for a second and said “holy crap—we’re really doing a lot.” It’s true, we are. “We” in this case is the Online Library Environment group at University of Virginia Library. Seven super people (three senior engineers, a senior programmer, two programmer/analyst/DBAs, and a librarian/project manager) report to me, and I report to a director who reports to the Deputy University Librarian. Like I said in my post about an internal presentation I gave on the development lifecycle, my group is responsible for many of the public-facing web services that the Library provides plus the technologies that sit behind those interfaces. Almost every project we take on is driven by stakeholders outside of our department who have their own highly valued areas of expertise (e.g. librarians, archivists, media specialists, etc.)

The reason I thought about writing this blog post was because this morning I had the opportunity to see some of the folks at the NINES / NEH Summer Institutes for Evaluating Digital Scholarship…not because I was participating in the institute in any way, but because I was on my way downstairs to get coffee and the participants were all working in the beautiful, wonderful, comfortable Scholars’ Lab. I was able to talk for a few moments with some scholars I like and respect very much, and one of them (Amy Earhart, if you’re playing along at home, who—to reiterate—is pretty great!) asked me what project I’m working on right now.

Project, singular.

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Julie’s Recommended Web Hosting Provider

This is a question that I am asked all the time: “do you have a recommendation for a good hosting provider?” You know what? I do.

In August 2009 I wrote a ProfHacker post called Website Hosting 101 which explains what a hosting provider does, how to use it, and what to look for (or, what makes a good hosting provider) such as reliability/server uptime, customer service, bandwidth, domain name purchase and mangement, price, scripting languages and database support, and having a good control panel for host management. Also in that post (and in Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, 8th ed.) I linked to several perfectly good hosting providers, all of which I have used in some way…yet I did not name a favorite.

I’ve always had a favorite, though. Well, at least since mid-2005, when I started using Daily Razor. That’s right: my #1 web hosting provider recommendation is DAILY RAZOR.

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a short presentation: "Development Lifecycle: From Requirement to Release"

In my capacity as Lead Technologist/Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment at the University of Virginia Library, I manage a group of people who are responsible for many of the public-facing web services that the Library provides plus the technologies that sit behind those interfaces. Almost every project we take on is driven by stakeholders outside of our department (e.g. non-developers, or people not versed in technical matters) who have their own highly valued areas of expertise.

This is a relatively new department; it wasn’t fully staffed until I got here in January. As you can imagine, any processes we’ve recently started to implement (e.g. having processes for starting/working through projects) require a lot of training and reiteration of norms and ideals. Within the Library we have several interest groups that meet regularly to talk about current and future projects, possibilities, questions, and so on; one of those groups is the User Experience (UX) interest group. People from all departments and at all levels (from the University Librarian on down the line) come to these meetings to hear presentations and ask questions.

Today I took the opportunity to talk briefly about how we in OLE work with the specific UX folks (Joe Gilbert and Erin Mayhood, if we’re naming names, which I am) in the service of our stakeholders and their projects. Specifically, I discussed what we expect stakeholders (project instigators!) to do, and what we do with that information, how we communicate throughout a project, and so on. These slides are pretty generic (and my presentation was only 15 minutes) but it was another opportunity to get in people’s minds how we as developers don’t (or shouldn’t) just come up with stuff on our own and decide willy-nilly to do something. There’s actually a process!

(The titles of the slides are: functional requirements, example functional requirement, writing use cases (or epics), writing stories, an actual example, writing code, never stop communicating, releasing)

Here are the slides themselves (view at slideshare.net if they do not appear below):

Development Lifecycle: From Requirement to Release
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"Everyone’s a Coder Now": a presentation at 4Cs

A couple weeks ago I presented at the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication) as part of Session H18: “Writing text, writing code, writing connections”. My co-panelists were the lovely and talented Annette Vee and Brian Ballentine, and the panel was chaired by the inimitable Dennis Jerz. We had a good turnout—something like 25 people, and not all of them were our close personal friends (!!).

Here’s the panel intro:

An underacknowledged relation of composition and rhetoric is code studies, the critical examination of source code that comprises computer software. Yet the expertise we have in pedagogy, rhetoric, speech acts and narrative offer potential contributions to this new field. This panel plumbs the connections between two important means of communication—written text and written code—to update our understandings of composing with computers. We map productive inroads to code studies by way of rhetoric, Speech Act Theory and narrative theory and collectively argue that code is already central to the discipline of composition and rhetoric.

Here’s the abstract for my part (I was first up):

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