the things I believe about learning to code (again)

This “learning to code” thing is turning into a meme. Or is a meme. Or something.

In January, I wrote Thoughts on Code Year, Codecademy, and Learning to Code because I have a visceral reaction to “hey! everyone code!” and it’s not a good one…despite the facts that I sell a lot of books that provide some foundation for learning some things about some programming and markup languages (that last sentence is accurate enough to appease all the people who think books like mine, and especially mine, suck).

I’m just going to restate this: everyone who wants to should learn to code. But they also damn well better know why — there has to be some goal besides “I want to be able to print ‘hello world’ in seven different languages”.

And if people want to learn to code so as to set themselves on a path to becoming a professional or an expert, then they also need to understand that any book (mine included), website, webinar, badge system, or anything else that isn’t actually working in some apprentice craftsman type of environment is just one teeny tiny step along the path. And note I didn’t say “forward” because sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes books, websites, webinars, badge systems, etc are lateral or backwards moves.

Blah blah blah.

And go read what Jeff Atwood has to say, because it’s smart and true, and honestly? It’s a heck of a lot like what educators have been saying about all this—that would be “educators”, not “Codecademy and Codecademy-knock off creators”.

The new Workplace SE — a great place to contribute and build some rep

It took over a year for The Workplace StackExchange site to get to public beta, and now that it is, I would like to ensure that people know it exists and is ready for your questions (and answers). This is especially true for people who have committed to the Digital Preservation SE proposal and are looking to gain experience in the StackExchange network.

As a new public beta (only 19 days old at the time of writing), it has a very brief FAQ and the specifics of the site scope are not written in stone; it’s a site and a community still defining itself. In general, however, The Workplace is for “members of the workforce navigating the professional setting.”

Sounds broad, I know. And it is! It’s also important to note that while a lot of the current users spend a lot of time at Programmers SE, Project Management SE, and UX SE—this is not an IT or software-development specific site. It’s not even specific to office jobs, although it’s true a lot of the questions skew that way because most community members have office jobs.

Some of the more popular tags for questions are résumé, hiring-process, career-development, and work-environment, to name but a few (of over a hundred).

Not only is it a nice place to be—plenty of space for questions and answers, helpful quasi-moderators (we don’t have official ones yet), low-key and useful—let me reiterate how useful it will be to all of the folks who want the Digital Preservation proposal to make it through the commitment stage: proposals need to have a number of users with at least 200 reputation on other SE sites, to show that there’s a core group of users who know how StackExchange works.

Come to The Workplace and get your feet wet! We’re friendly.

Avoiding Tall Hedges (or silos, if you prefer a different farming metaphor)

A recent 37signals blog post, “Making shit work is everyone’s job”, captures the essence of the spaces in which I like to work (and currently do). The post has also ruffled a few feathers, at least in the comment thread, of those who focus not on the concept but on the literal practicality of it.

Before going any further, it’s important to note that the emphasis in the title should be on the word work, not the word shit—the latter implies a bunch of pointy-haired bosses doling out tasks from the Big Bucket of Scutwork you just know they keep under their desks. Instead, DHH’s point in the post is that when you hear an employee say “Oh, that’s not my job,” you have some managerial work to do.

Departmental hedges grow fast and tall if not trimmed with vigor. It’s the natural path unless you take steps to fight it.

Taking steps to eliminate the “that’s not my job” attitude is crucial; no one should ever consider themselves too good to do any job that makes the company go.

In my company, there is a natural split between the people who do technical development work and the people who handle large amounts of paper (which end up as electronic documents). Both are important to the forward progress of the company, but there are skillsets among both groups that do not overlap. People in each group are not inherently better than people in the other, but of course the efficiency and quality of the work would differ depending on who did it—case in point, I can create web apps in my sleep, but if you ask me to work a scanner of any sort, I will stare at it for an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which way to put the paper in (and don’t ever ask me to print on letterhead, because it’ll never work). But we know we have the right people because if shit had to get done, people would try to find a way to do it. All of them, from the CEO on down the tree.

Sure, there might be fallout, but I’d rather deal with the fallout of monkeypatched code and its ilk than deal with the ongoing management problem of people with delusions of grandeur or who overly value turf.

To my mind, there’s also a related issue of the very real need to ensure that the people who are doing particular tasks are free to do those tasks. It’s not building hedges (or silos) to have people dedicated to tasks such as systems administration and engineering so that developers are free to, well, develop. I would argue that filling gaps with people possessing the right skillsets to ensure continual forward momentum (smoothly) is actually an ongoing hedge-trimming activity.

The Most Wonderful and Hopeful Article I Read as a Graduate Student

As an outsider to the field/subfield/whatever, I spend very little time these days listening to Digital Humanities & related folks. But because several of my closest friends are theorists/practitioners in the field/subfield/whatever, it’s inevitable that I hear something about what’s Going On, and rare is the day that I don’t mentally refer back to Bethany Nowviskie’s post “Eternal September of the Digital Humanities”.

But I usually have another publication in mind when I’m listening to these conversations. I’m going to quote liberally from it and then let’s play a little game.

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Leveling Up (or, "I have a new job!")

It’s been a busy month around here. In the two-and-a-half weeks since I wrote my last blog post (“Be a Sponge”), in which I alluded to a job that I’ve had my eye on since (I kid you not) August 8th, 2009, I was working my then-future-now-current employer pretty hard to make it happen. Luckily for me, it worked! I am again gainfully employed.

I’m pleased as punch to tell you all that I’m now the Executive Vice President of Product and Technology at Interfolio.

Specifically, it’s my job to lead the already-intact and highly capable Development and Product Management teams in the design, development, implementation, maintenance, and analysis of software applications, information systems infrastructure, and data management policies and systems. Easy, right? As I told Steve Goldenberg, CEO of Interfolio and My New Boss, “Great! That’s plenty to do. I’ll be here a while.” As part of the company’s strategic leadership team, my focus is the continual alignment of product and technology initiatives as we create and maintain solutions that streamline the application, communication, and review process between institutions of higher education and their applicants.

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Be a Sponge

There’s a job out there that I’ve wanted since August 8, 2009. Thing is, it never existed as an open position (still doesn’t), and until now I’ve never told anyone. The other thing is, I’m going to get that job. In the future I see in my head, that job is mine.

In 2009, I wouldn’t have been ready for it. And in 2009, it’s not like I started planning for it or shaped the last couple years of my work specifically to prepare for it (heck, when I interviewed for a position at UVa—different than the one I ended up taking and leaving after a year—I truly thought I’d be there a long time).

The job I want requires me to be able to identify business opportunities, risks, and trends; strategically plan and implement technology to meet short-term and long-term goals; implement and direct development methodologies and mentor developers in their use; provide opportunities for growth and leadership to others in the organization. These are the things I’ve been preparing to do for a long time—not just for the last three years—by doing (and by both succeeding and failing, and learning something from both), and by listening and paying attention to, well, everything I could that’s remotely related to the above.

If there’s one piece of advice that students should have hammered into them—and that’s “students” in the sense of “anyone trying to learn something new, be it in a formal or informal setting”—it’s to find a thread in what you’re learning and yank on it until it leads you outside the classroom, whereupon you best soak up everything you can. (I even said as much somewhere in this old ProfHacker post on mentoring graduate students.)

Excuse me for a moment while I beat this analogy into the ground…

Without a doubt, there’s junk you’ll mop up and squeeze out into the drain and will cause you to want to bleach your sponge or throw it away and use a new one. But then there’s those times you’ll come across a pool of glorious knowledge and you’ll want to soak it up and keep it in a mason jar on the shelf.

No, really. You will. I have mental mason jars labelled “Houston” and “Nowviskie” and “Watters” and “Leon” and “O’Reilly” and “Spolsky” and “Atwood” and “Nielsen” and plenty more. And I get more every day, because I pay attention to everything I can get my grubby little hands on.

When I get that job that I want, it’ll be because I listened and paid attention and made connections between subjects, people, needs, desires, and so on, and I did something with that knowledge. Do something; do anything. Keep pushing. Focus on a goal. Ignore whatever barriers you perceive, or keep banging your head against (YMMV), or find a way around them (hint: often helps to bring others with you, and while some object to the terminology, I’m a fan of flanking attacks). Keep moving forward, and soak up everything.

Yes, when I get that job, I’ll explain where “August 8, 2009″ comes from, and how I knew what I wanted to do for Unnamed Company if I ever carved out the opportunity.

Dear StackExchange: Will You Be My Valentine?

With all due respect to my partner, I am totally in love with StackExchange, the network of Q&A sites that began with StackOverflow and, over the last few years, has blossomed into one of the best communities I have ever seen on the interwebs.

I don’t say things like that lightly. I mean, I’m one of those grumbly old jaded “get offa my lawn, you!” people who has been working and building things on the web for a really long time (18 freaking years, if you’re counting at home). I’ve kept my distance from discussion/Q&A forums and listservs in recent years for a few reasons, boiled down to these: a lot of people are jerks, and a lot of people don’t even try to help themselves—both of these factors just waste everyone’s time, effort, and goodwill, and those are things I let affect me far more than I should.

But given the new year (always a good time to start new things), time on my hands after quitting my job, and a deep desire to get back to my roots (firmly planted outside of academia), I decided to commit time to becoming a good community member at StackExchange. Since I follow both Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) and Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) on Twitter and have read/enjoyed/learned from each of their blogs for a long time, I figured if there was going to be any network that I embedded myself within, it was going to be one that they started.
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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.