Tag: coding

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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?

Categories
Education

The (Online) Self-Educated: Doing What Colleges Can’t

Education is stuck at all levels. Increasingly so the older a student gets. College students not only face back-breaking debt, but also come out of their four-to-six year sojourns with little to no increase in their abilities or knowledge.

In one recent study, a group of students were asked to take a standardized test covering skills students are expected to garner from an undergraduate education, and 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college, while 36 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” at all over their four years of college.

Traditional models of education don’t deliver a quality education at a realistic or reliable scale – we would need thousands more teachers to appropriately educate everyone, and no one wants to be a teacher because they get paid like crap and are blamed for the dismal future of our kids and the next generation.

So when young people graduate college, the education they receive is mostly useless; we can all get the same education or better online. If we’re self-motivated.

“But how many people really have what it takes — the courage, the stamina, the native smarts, the willingness to admit mistakes without blaming others, the sheer and extreme initiative — to learn that way? The entrepreneurial gene is not widely distributed,” argues Alan Jacobs.

Indeed, MIT offers many of its computer science classes online, but many of us are not likely to start one, let alone finish it, despite any express desires to learn programming. Not to mention the field of computer science has a myriad of resources on the Internet, all of which are free, to teach yourself how to learn math, javascript, html, ruby, and so on and so forth.

And we really need programmers to fuel the next phase of innovation. I work for a start-up, and my company is looking to hire multiple engineers. At every tech meetup I attend, non-technical founders are practically begging to partner with developers. And those who do hold these elusive titles are often recruited with incentives and bonuses.

Seems like a bunch of us would want to jump on the self-education boat and get after this opportunity to become one of the most sought-after titles in the world. But most people don’t follow-through (even when they have the express goal to learn programming). There is still a dearth of developers, despite the wide availability of knowledge on the Internet.

Which begs the question, is web education really the future?

In real life, we idealistically view education as “a dynamic and interactive environment in which students have daily real-world encounters with faculty and with one another, encounters which, unlike Google searches, are not limited by what you already know to search for,” argues Jacobs. “In many cases, those schools also require you to take classes you would never choose on your own, to read books you’ve never heard of, to articulate thoughts about issues so challenging that left to your own devices you’d just go do something else.”

True. But while Jacobs ultimately concludes that DIY education is “parasitic on existing universities,” (he is a University professor, after all), web education will be a force to be reckoned with.

First, we need to come to terms that free education and distributed knowledge is largely useless. Yes, a small cohort of people will take up the cause to learn a new skill or dive deep into a topic of study, but the rest of us will watch TED videos contentedly in our cubicles as our educational fill for the day.

The availability of free information is not enough. It needs to be organized appropriately, with content that is delivered sequentially over time instead of all at once. Each lesson or module needs to build upon the last in a clear path of knowledge. The information needs to be available in different formats and platforms to accommodate different learning styles and technologies (i.e., videos, transcripts, mobile, tablet, etc.).

And web education has to go beyond exceptional content. It needs leaders with expertise and authority, as well as a passion to teach. It needs learners that can use comments or live chats to ask questions and throw out ideas to see what sticks. And those learners need the opportunity to speak individually to the teacher through group coaching calls or individual mentorship.

In essence, online education needs to mirror the best of real-world education. Can it be better than an in-person experience? By far, yes. You can watch video-based lectures over and over again. You can pace modules to your rhythm. And, teachers won’t speak from theory, but success and experience. Not to mention an amazing community that will want to learn with you.

Web education can do what colleges can’t – deliver knowledge at an impressive scale and at an affordable price to change the direction of knowledge for the better. Log on.

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.