v5.0 June 2011

Analyse changes to Wikipeda edits in description of the file

"It accomplishes the desired goal without changing the design of the system it is embedded in. Despite often being at odds with the design of the larger system, a hack is generally quite clever and effective."

The original Hackers Dictionary maintained at MIT until the 1980s. Another reminder that hacking grew out of academia

Etherpad Lite v1.1 << gets plugin architecture and with it, video chat

At my “Scaling, Servers, and Deploys — Oh My!” talk (slides) at WordCamp San Francisco 2011, I talked a bit about my ideal WordPress repo setup. In the spirit of sharing, I’ve now made that skeleton setup into a GitHub repo.

What you get is a WordPress repo starter kit. WordPress is in a subdirectory (/wp/), content is in a custom directory (/content/), and uploads are mapped to /shared/content/uploads/, which is a Git-ignored location. Re-symlink as appropriate, or alter your deploy script to do the symlinking on the fly.

You get a nice clean wp-config.php with a few of my tips and tricks already implemented (like local-config.php support for local development). .htaccess is ready to go with WordPress rewrite rules for anyone running on Apache.

I don’t really expect people to use it exactly the way I have it set up (though feel free!). What’s more likely is that people will fork it, and then make it their own. For instance, you may want to add mu-plugins drop-ins that you frequently use. Have fun!

The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.

A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York. Even if Mr. Bloomberg did "learn to code", with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we'd end up with this:

10 PRINT "I AM MAYOR"
20 GOTO 10

Fortunately, the odds of this technological flight of fancy happening – even in jest – are zero, and for good reason: the mayor of New York City will hopefully spend his time doing the job taxpayers paid him to do instead. According to the Office of the Mayor home page, that means working on absenteeism programs for schools, public transit improvements, the 2013 city budget, and … do I really need to go on?

To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can't see it.

Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing. That'd be ridiculous, right?

The "everyone should learn to code" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways.

It assumes that more code in the world is an inherently desirable thing. In my thirty year career as a programmer, I have found this … not to be the case. Should you learn to write code? No, I can't get behind that. You should be learning to write as little code as possible. Ideally none.
It assumes that coding is the goal. Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it's not. Their job is to solve problems. Don't celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions. We have way too many coders addicted to doing just one more line of code already.
It puts the method before the problem. Before you go rushing out to learn to code, figure out what your problem actually is. Do you even have a problem? Can you explain it to others in a way they can understand? Have you researched the problem, and its possible solutions, deeply? Does coding solve that problem? Are you sure?
It assumes that adding naive, novice, not-even-sure-they-like-this-whole-programming-thing coders to the workforce is a net positive for the world. I guess that's true if you consider that one bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. And for that matter, most people who already call themselves programmers can't even code, so please pardon my skepticism of the sentiment that "everyone can learn to code".
It implies that there's a thin, easily permeable membrane between learning to program and getting paid to program professionally. Just look at these new programmers who got offered jobs at an average salary of $79k/year after attending a mere two and a half month bootcamp! Maybe you too can teach yourself Perl in 24 hours! While I love that programming is an egalitarian field where degrees and certifications are irrelevant in the face of experience, you still gotta put in your ten thousand hours like the rest of us.

I suppose I can support learning a tiny bit about programming just so you can recognize what code is, and when code might be an appropriate way to approach a problem you have. But I can also recognize plumbing problems when I see them without any particular training in the area. The general populace (and its political leadership) could probably benefit most of all from a basic understanding of how computers, and the Internet, work. Being able to get around on the Internet is becoming a basic life skill, and we should be worried about fixing that first and most of all, before we start jumping all the way into code.

Please don't advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …

Research voraciously, and understand how the things around us work at a basic level.
Communicate effectively with other human beings.

These are skills that extend far beyond mere coding and will help you in every aspect of your life.



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@Farkie this?

The Hackday Manifesto #devcsi #dev8d #devxs

I used to tell this joke:

An engineer says, “Theory approximates reality.”
A mathematician says, “Reality approximates theory.”
A sociologist says, “Would you like fries with that?”

I stopped telling it after someone who actually was a sociologist pointed out just how much it revealed about my value system. By the time she and her partner finished dissecting the cultural biases implicit in those three lines, and analyzing what my choice to tell that joke in that setting to that audience revealed about my peer group’s belief system, the humor had pretty much evaporated.

Skip forward ten years. It was the early 2000s, just after the first dot-com bubble burst, and I started noticing that all of a sudden, programmers were taking design and graphic designers seriously. Overnight, it seemed, companies had started paying designers competitively and giving them real authority. Somehow, nerds like me who had made jokes about people with “soft” skills (and boy, isn’t that term revealing) had come to realize just how valuable and difficult those skills were.

Skip forward a few more years to 2010. After a lot of rear-guard defensive denial on my part, Jorge Aranda, Marian Petre, and others had finally convinced me that “soft” (qualitative) research techniques weren’t just another way to explore how software development teams worked—in many cases, they were the best way. When I left the University of Toronto to work full-time on Software Carpentry, though, I didn’t transfer that understanding to education. Instead, I only read things based on “hard” data, i.e., statistical results from controlled experiments. In retrospect, it’s little wonder I was so frustrated by how little it helped me…

Skip forward one more time to 2012. The web is abuzz with techies and business people explaining how they’re going to fix education. What most of them actually mean is, “Here’s how we’re going to make money from education,” but that’s not what this post is about. What it’s about is that they don’t value educators professionally the way they value designers [1]. Just take a look at the ed-tech startups Audrey Watters has profiled in the last twelve months: how many have anyone in house who has spent even two full days boning up on the psychology of learning, the evidential basis for different instructional techniques, or the reasons why previous attempts to technologize classrooms have failed?

I think that if we (and by “we”, I mean programmers) really want to help people, we need to meet educators halfway. We need to learn as much about education as we now do about graphic design, business, marketing, and intellectual property law. I realize it’s difficult—there aren’t “serious amateur” books about education for techies like there are about graphic design [2]—but throwing questions from the Audrey Test into Google is a start. I’d certainly be a lot further ahead if I’d done that two years ago, and I suspect most ed-tech startups will be further ahead two years from now if they get started today.

[1] This isn’t an industry vs. academia thing: the software engineering researchers who described statistical work in Making Software didn’t feel the need to defend the value of their methods in the way that the people doing qualitative work did.

[2] At least, I haven’t found any.

Interesting profile of a hacker and the extent that his understanding of technology has influenced the tools he uses.