Tag: code

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Entrepreneurship Start-ups Videos

How to “Fake It Until You Make It”

Quick background: I spoke at the meetup DC Tech earlier this week, which is a monthly event that rivals the NY Tech scene with more than 1000 attendees. My brief talk was about how you can “fake it until you make it” when learning how to code. It was so well received, and so many people requested the presentation notes, I thought I would share a special screencast version of the presentation created just for this blog.

Also, the sound on this video seems loud to me, so you may want to turn down your volume a bit before watching.

Transcript of this video:

I am not a developer. No one would ever hire me as an engineer. But I do love to tinker.

I believe that anyone can build a site and in the process, begin to learn how to code. And I’m going to share with you how I’ve done that today.

For many of you, this will seem too simplistic, but I wanted to show the non-techies out there how easy it is to create a minimum viable product with little to no knowledge of code.

Last year, I tested several of my start-up ideas. One of the last ideas I explored was for a site called Design Pluck – a sort of Pinterest meets Craigslist. The idea was to help design enthusiasts discover design one-of-a-finds in their local neighborhoods. It’s not something I’m pursuing, so feel free to steal the idea. It’s gotten great feedback.

I used three different approaches to “fake” my way into building Design Pluck with only rudimentary knowledge of code:

1. The Search Approach.

I used Google to find a pre-made theme that I could just download and install on my WordPress site. WordPress only takes a quick ten minutes to set up and allows you to change and interact with your site without looking at or touching the code.

Now if you’re not familiar, WordPress themes are completely useable out-of-the-box, but I specifically searched for a theme that was fairly plain and simple, so that I could treat it more like a paint-by-number canvas and customize it the way I wanted.

Most of the differences between the original theme and my site are purely stylistic, or what the web world calls CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). If you had a set of boxes in your living room, you could fairly easy paint them different colors, and that’s exactly what I did.

What was once mostly white and pink on the original theme is now mostly gray and blue on Design Pluck.

CSS isn’t difficult. You just replace one color code with another, and like switching out lipsticks, you’ve just given your site a makeover.

2. The Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V approach (i.e., Copy-And-Paste).

When I wanted to have the search bar functionality follow the user as they scrolled down the site, similar to how Pinterest’s navigation bar follows you, I found a Java code snippet via search that I copied and pasted into the site’s documents. And let me back up and say, I had no idea what I was doing or where to put this Java snippet. I just tried many different places until it worked.

The lesson here is that you’re allowed to experiment. You won’t break anything. A voice in your head may tell you, “no, don’t touch that!” but you can and you should. Your site is your sandbox.

(Just make sure to copy or back-up the existing code before you do anything so you can go back and reference the original if need be.)

So as you’re browsing, the Java snippet allows the search bar to follow you, so when get overwhelmed and decide there are too many choices and you only want to see red items, you can tell the search bar just show me red items in my neighborhood, and voila!

Now, the Java snippet allowed me to have this search bar follow the user, but it didn’t create the custom search in the first place. The way I created my custom search was through my third and final approach.

3. The Download/Upload Approach.

It’s very easy to find different plugins that again, similar to themes, allow you to create the functionality you want on your site out-of-the-box. You simply download them from the many repositories out there, and upload them to your site.

Plugins are modules that allow you to completely bypass the overwhelming process of coding everything from scratch.

Like legos, plugins are out-of-the-box blocks that play nicely with others, and as you fit more and more together, you can create something very complex and very powerful.

The plugins on the Design Pluck site include the custom search boxes, the sign-up form, custom fields, custom posts, the like button, which allows users to like their favorites which will then show up on a favorites page – also a plugin – location maps, an email plugin and more.

All of that functionality is as easy as clicking download, and then clicking upload.

Learn to Code
Of course, eventually you will hit a wall, and will want to do more than these three approaches will allow. In the process, you’ll begin to learn how to code. For this site, I learned a ton about PHP, a bit about JQuery Masonry, and a whole lot more.

I ended up writing some simple code, but what I’m most proud of is that I wrote several of my first functions simply by mirroring  the code I saw in other places.

Just one example of those functions is on the individual store pages. I wanted a store’s products to show up below their store information, and wrote a function to make that happen.

So if you click on a store page like Miss Pixies on 14th St, you would be able to see their store information at the top of the page, and at the bottom, you’d find all of their current inventory to shop.

To you, it may seem like a minor win, but to me, when I figured this out, it felt like I had literally changed the world.

I hope you enjoy changing the world in your own way with these approaches.

Have you ever used any “fake-it” approaches in building a website, or just in business and life?

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Women

Women in Tech Need to Stop Segregating Themselves

   I don’t particularly like writing about women and tech. It’s uncomfortable. And it makes me uncomfortable. It means sometimes critiquing people that have been nice to me. It also means critiquing an industry that people like. It’s companies like Facebook, after all, not BP.

It also means that because I know and have experienced exactly how the tech industry is covert – and not in a Chuck Bartowski kind of way – that I should somehow know how to navigate the mines. That I should somehow be farther ahead than I am. But I don’t. And I’m not.

I don’t think it’s just me. It’s other women too. They feel uncomfortable. The simple act of writing about women in tech means I’m asking them to define their relationship with tech as more than their roles in PR, human resources, marketing and community management. It’s insinuating that those roles aren’t good enough. That women need to code. That they need to be the founders and visionaries and C-level execs. There is a sense that women don’t want these roles, but really, there is not even an inch – not even a centimeter! – of a clear path to get there.

So, women in tech are stuck on a career roundabout when men logically take the next exits to code, found, and invest. Pseudo-equality exists, but only to satiate the cries for respect and inclusion, not to actually address or eliminate sexism. For instance, the typical response to the lack of women in tech is to form pockets of women, which just adds more turbulence to the discussion: tech blogs publish posts from women about a woman’s role in tech; a tech meet-up features presentations from female-only founders; women form mailing lists for other women to discuss the problem of more women in tech.

In reality, guest posts from women on tech blogs need to be about topics other than themselves. When women are invited to blog on Tech Crunch, they write about women. They don’t write about tech. Last time I checked, however, our knowledge extends far beyond that of ourselves. And, just because a woman is speaking doesn’t mean she speaks for me. I don’t particularly like talking about shoes and I certainly don’t believe that because women love to shop that we control the Internet. And yet, that’s the message so far, twice-over this year, when women take the pen on Tech Crunch.

Without a voice in these places and without access to leadership in others, it seems women are keen to start women-only groups and mailing lists to promote new leadership and get ourselves heard. But while that’s an easy route, it’s not the most effective. Particularly because existing leaders and power-brokers will never attend your meetups and will never join your conversations. We all just end up talking to people like ourselves.

Too many women-only groups exist now to stop them, but really, I don’t disagree with them in theory, just in execution. So here’s a simple solution now: co-plan and co-sponsor your next event. Bring both audiences and decisions-makers together. Invite a man to your Google Group in exchange for a seat at his CEO breakfast. Separate interests are well and good, but not when you silo dialogue and interaction.

And that’s doubly and triply true at tech events. The segregation of women and men on stage needs to stop. So, if you organize an event an like the DC Tech Meetup and you get complaints about the persistence of your all-male panels, your response should not be to create an all-female panel.

There are no make-up tests for equality. You can’t just show up with all the available women in one room and expect a gold star. It is far less important to see all the women in tech at once than it is to see all the women in tech as speakers over time consistently and often. There are a minority of women in tech (for reasons we’ve talked so far about here and here), but that doesn’t beget special gloves. Such an event is unavoidably condescending, and it also means you won’t have any women for your next event; the cycle of men on stage continues.

(Case in point, of the seventeen speakers and panelists scheduled at yesterday’s DC Tech Meetup, the event following their all-female panel, only one was a woman. That’s not good enough.)

I don’t think that the majority of men, or women for that matter, are intentionally holding women back and fencing them out of the tech industry. But no one is being particularly smart about the issue either. It seems everyone is throwing spaghetti on the cupboard to see what sticks. But we can do better. This is start-up land, after all. We know how to test and evaluate, to solve problems and find solutions. And we already know, the only way to have enough people working on the big problems, is to solve this little one.

Categories
Women

Women Struggle With New Literacy: Programming Your Life

The web makes it easier than ever to test and execute on your ideas, at least for those who know how to code: Mark, Aaron, Ev and Biz – you know, the ones running the show. These guys along with other young lads are defining, controlling and programming your life.

“Only an elite gains the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in Program or Be Programmed. “The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs. As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.”

Young white males are still in charge just as they have always been. If you want real equality, everyone needs to build the revolution. Women need to learn how to code.

“Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer internet and e-commerce companies.  Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet,” argues Aileen Lee on Tech Crunch. She goes on to reveal that 77% of Groupon’s customers are female and that women oversee over 80% of consumer spending, or about $5 trillion dollars annually.

All well and good, but women do not rule the Internet. We are not deciding how these experiences are being developed, built or regulated. We are not deciding how products are displayed, inventoried, or marketed. We are not creating the user interfaces or user experience.

While more than 50% of the US population are female, 92% of founders are male and 87% of founding teams are all-male, report several studies. Not to mention computer science is one of the last disciplines where there is a gender imbalance in the US: about 80% male, 20% female.

Arguing that women control the Internet because we love to shop only panders to and reinforces the social construct that will truly bring equality: being part of the revolution as it happens.

No longer is it enough to know how to put together a slide deck or write and publish a blog post. Instead of learning how to build the software, we learn how to use the software. And when you use programs that are made for us without understanding how they work, you allow the technology to teach you. But you can teach the technology. Programming decides the limitations, the possibilities. It’s all within the variables and commands behind the curtain.

Maybe you don’t mind all this. If you want to be directed by technology and those who have mastered it, that’s fine. But don’t expect any semblance of equality any time soon. If you want to direct technology however, if you want to be at the forefront of this revolution and define what life will look like, you need to code.

“Gender imbalance materially impacts innovation,” VC Brad Feld told me in a recent interview. “Over the next twenty years, the only way we’ll have enough software engineers working on hard problems is to get more women involved. In addition, I believe that mixed gender teams are more effective at driving innovation and, especially when you consider many of the products being created impact our every day lives, it’s clearly a major inhibitor not to have women involved in the creation of these products.”

No kidding. Why is innovation, that which influences everything else, still ruled by young white males? If the new literacy is programming, women are just as behind as ever. “We lose sight of the fact that the programming—the code itself—is the place from which the most significant innovations emerge,” argues Rushkoff.

Feminism has run stagnant with modern young women, but I have its rallying cry for the new century: program your life. Don’t let others do it for you. Women will not find equality by giving themselves credit or solving workplace flexibility. Even when we do everything right, we still fail women. But today, the web allows such low barriers to entry that anyone can control our future. Let’s hope anyone includes more than a few women.