Sometimes it is great to work for a large company that gives you opportunities to do some good. I am currently in New York to run a workshop with All Star Code in our offices. Originally Aaron Gustafson was supposed to also be part of this but he got sick. Instead I am happy to work with Rachel White, Claudius Mbemba and Adina Shanholtz to help All Star Code.

Originally All Star Code approached me to get a bulk order for Surfaces for their students to work with. When I heard that their curriculum was involving Git, Node, Web Development and Debugging in Browsers and the stack was Sublime Text and Chrome Devtools I offered a small change. So now we’ll be teaching the teachers of All Star Code’s next course how to use Visual Studio Code and do all the development and debugging inside that one. My main driver there was that Code is open source and thus the students don’t need to get another license.

If you wonder what All Star Code does you can head over to the Decoded Chats blog, where I interviewed Mahdi Shadkamfarrokhi, their head of curriculum.

If you prefer to have an audio version, you can download it here (MP3, 18MB)

Here are the questions I asked:

1. You work for All Star Code. Can you give us a quick introduction what that is and what you do? (00:13)
2. How low are the numbers of developers that came from a minority background? What are the main reasons? (01:40)
3. Do you think that by teaching communication skills together with technological skills you become more interesting for someone with a less privileged background? Is selling technology skills as a part of a whole package more successful? (02:49)
4. The program has been running for quite a while. Is there a success story you are really proud of? (04:20)
5. You learn a lot by teaching as you can’t fake it – you have to know. Do you find that it is easier to keep your skills up-to-date by running this program? (04:46)
6. What are the biggest barriers for your students to get into development? Is it hardware access? Connectivity? The style and language of documentation out there? (06:14)
7. I learned a lot because when I started computers didn’t do much and you had to program. Do you think that nowadays kids are less inclined to learn as computers are more seen as a consumption device? (07:47)
8. There is a vast amount of online courses to choose from when it comes to learning how to program. Many of them decayed a bit after the first round of funding dried out. How do you find great and trustworthy resources? (10:10)
9. A lot of creativity happens on the web but these makers don’t know or don’t get into professional development. Where do you go to find people for your course? (12:04)
10. Do you see Open Source and services like GitHub to host, document and discuss your projects as an opportunity for newcomers? (14:49)
11. How can people help you? Are there ways to volunteer? (18:07)

I’m very excited to be working on this.

This is an unashamed plug for Remy Sharp’s terminal training course command line for non–techies. Go over there and have a look at what he’s lined up for a very affordable price. In a series of videos he explains all the ins and outs of the terminal and its commands that can make you much more effective in your day-to-day job.

I’ve read the ebook of the same course and have to say that I learned quite a few things but – more importantly – remembered a lot I had forgotten. By using the findings over and over a lot has become muscle memory, but it is tough to explain what I am doing. Remy did a great job making the dark command line magic more understandable and less daunting. Here is what the course covers:

Course material

“Just open the terminal”

• Just open the terminal (03:22)
• Why use a terminal? (03:23)
• Navigating directories (07:71)
• Navigation shortcuts (01:06)

Install all the things

• Running applications (05:47)
• brew install fun (07:46)
• gem install (06:32)
• npm install—global (09:44)
• Which is best? (02:13)

Tools of the Terminal Trade

• Connecting programs (08:25)
• echo & cat (01:34)
• grep “searching” (06:22)
• head tail less (10:24)
• sort | uniq (07:58)

How (not) to shoot yourself in the foot

• Delete all the things (07:42)
• Super user does…sudo (07:50)
• Permissions: mode & owner (11:16)
• Kill kill kill! (12:21)
• Health checking (12:54)

Making the shell your own

• Owning your terminal (09:19)
• Fish ~> (10:18)
• Themes (01:51)
• zsh (zed shell) (10:11)
• zsh plugins: z st… (08:26)
• Aliases (05:43)
• Alias++ → functions (08:15)

Furthering your command line

• Piping workflow (08:14)
• Setting environment values (03:04)
• Default environment variable values (01:46)
• Terminal editors (06:41)
• wget and cURL (09:53)
• ngrok for tunnelling (06:38)
• json command for data massage (07:51)
• awk for splitting output into columns (04:11)
• xargs (for when pipes won’t do) (02:15)
• …fun bonus-bonus video (04:13)

I am not getting anything for this, except for making sure that someone as lovely and dedicated as Remy may reach more people with his materials. So, take a peek.

In November last year I got asked to give a talk about the state of the JavaScript community at Halfstackconf in London. Now you can watch the recording the talk at opbeat.

I really enjoyed giving this talk as I think we’re taking ourselves far too serious and we overestimate the importance of the languages that we use. Instead of building a high pressure environment of blind innovation we should be more like the language we use. JavaScript is a mess, but it was a very accessible mess in terms of getting people to start working with it. PHP has the same issues and as much as we can joke about its inconsistencies, it powers easily half the web servers we use. JavaScript has a lot of nuances and use cases and each of them come with different best practices. They also come with different experiences and sometimes learning means doing things wrong first and understanding that what you did was wrong later.

There is too much dogma in our little world. The people who love JavaScript tend to overarchitect solutions or create very strict syntax rules. This can frustrate people who think differently and cause lots of unnecessary discussion. Even worse, it can discourage people who want to start using JavaScript as they are overwhelmed by these demands. People who don’t like JavaScript have a tendency to either dismiss it as not professional or as a problem for end users as any mistake of the developer would result in a non-working interface. All of these people have the right to their ideas and are technically correct. But that doesn’t help us as a community.

There is an overuse of JavaScript right now. Far too many products rely on it and far too many developers use a lot of libraries and modules to create pretty simple interfaces. We need to own the use of JavaScript and we need to understand that people of all knowledge levels and with vastly varying approaches are using the language now. This is not a time for dogma, this is a time for education by helping people reach their goals quickly. I’d love to see JavaScript be the language that makes people enjoy creating and learning a new skill. Not a battleground of hardened principles and wishful thinking of what the language should be. We need more diversity and we can get it by making what we do accessible to people of all kinds of backgrounds. Nobody should be feeling stupid for trying to use JavaScript. It isn’t rocket science.

I just watched a very important talk from last year’s Beyond Tellerand conference in Berlin. Sacha Judd (@szechuan) delivered her How the tech sector could move in One Direction at this conference and Webstock in New Zealand a few days ago. It is a great example of how a talk can be insightful, exciting and challenge your biases at the same time.

You can watch the video, read the transcript and get the slides.

I’ve had this talk on my “to watch” list for a long time and the reason is simple: I couldn’t give a toss about One Direction. I was – like many others – of the impression that boy bands like them are the spawn of commercial satan (well, Simon Cowell, to a large degree) and everything that is wrong with music as an industry and media spectacle.

And that’s the great thing about this talk: it challenged my biases and it showed me that by dismissing something not for me I also discard a lot of opportunity.

This isn’t a talk about One Direction. It is a talk about how excitement for a certain topic gets people to be creative, communicate and do things together. That their tastes and hysteria aren’t ours and can be off-putting isn’t important. What is important is that people are driven to create. And it is important to analyse the results and find ways to nurture this excitement. It is important to possibly channel it into ways how these fans can turn the skills they learned into a professional career.

This is an extension to something various people (including me) kept talking about for quite a while. It is not about technical excellence. It is about the drive to create and learn. Our market changes constantly. This is not our parent’s 50ies generation where you get a job for life and you die soon after retirement, having honed and used one skill for your whole lifetime. We need to roll with the punches and changes in our markets. We need to prepare to be more human as the more technical we are, the easier we are to be replaced my machines.

When Mark Surman of Mozilla compared the early days of the web to his past in the punk subculture creating fanzines by hand it resonated with me. As this is what I did, too.

When someone talks about fanpages on tumblr about One Direction, it didn’t speak to me at all. And that’s a mistake. The web has moved from a technical subculture flourishing under an overly inflated money gamble (ecommerce, VC culture) to being a given. Young people don’t find the web. They are always connected and happy to try and discard new technology like they would fashion items.

But young people care about things, too. And they find ways to tinker with them. When a fan of One Direction gets taught by friends how to change CSS to make their Tumblr look different or use browser extensions to add functionality to the products they use to create content we have a magical opportunity.

Our job as people in the know is to ensure that the companies running creation tools don’t leave these users in the lurch when the VC overlords tell them to pivot. Our job is to make sure that they can become more than products to sell on to advertisers. Our job is to keep an open mind and see how people use the media we helped create. Our job is to go there and show opportunities, not to only advertise on hackernews. Our job is to harvest these creative movements to turn them into to the next generation of carers of the web.

I want to thank Sacha for this talk. There is a lot of great information in there and I don’t want to give it all away. Just watch it.

Yesterday I gave the closing keynote of the Tweakers Developer Summit in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The conference topic was “Webdevelopment – Coding the Universe” and the organisers asked me to give a talk about Machine Learning and what it means for developers in the nearer future. So I took out my crystal ball 🔮 and whipped up the following talk:

Here are the resources covered in the talk:

• GOAT raising $25M for marketplace for collectible sneakers – this was an example of how we as developers failing at influencing what our market is doing. We’re still at a stage where plain consumerism wins the big investments and technology is used to cater to the needs of a very small, very affluent group
• The Robot Takeover – an interactive site telling you how safe your job is from being taken over by a robot. Based on this research in PDF format
• Movie written by AI
• Daddy’s Car – a song written by AI after analysing lots of Beatles songs
• AI software learns to write AI software – Google Brain coding itself
• Beer brewed by AI
• Chinese factory replacing 90% of humans with robots – 250% more productivity, defects 90% down
• The Power of Big Data and Psychographics – an incredibly scary presentation of Cambridge Analytica at Concordia summit showing how applying the OCEAN psychology test to Facebook quizzes allowed them to influence voters in the Brexit and Trump votes
• Meitu’s App Permissions – an app to make sparkly selfies has full access to your phone now
• Google Photos and its impressive use of Machine Learning to tag and find your own photos
• Pinterest Lens – a Shazam for everyday objects
• AIPoly – an app to detect objects and tell blind users what they are using a Neural Network on the device instead of having to be online and suffering the latency that comes with that. Demo video here
• Google’s DeepMind’s lip reading success – AI can read lips four times better than humans. You can also read the scientific paper on it
• Microsoft Office using Cognitive Services – PowerPoint now creates text alternatives for images
• Learning tools in Microsoft OneNote and a video on how that helps educators
• Live translation of phone calls using Cognitive Services and Skype
• Google Allo using machine learning to create recommended answers to posted images
• Pixel recursive super resolution is a method to create facial images from 8×8 pixel input using machine learning. In essence it is making the zoom and enhance movie trope reality.
• Google open sourced their DeepMind Lab to train AI. The code is on GitHub and the “paper available on Arxiv
• Facebook explained and released their image segmentation algo showing you how to detect shapes in images and classify them
• ImageNet is a database of described images
• Open images dataset is Google’s alternative to ImageNet, a lot of metadata for image URLs described with humain aid
• CaptionBot is a demo by microsoft using Cognitive Services to describe images.
• Microsoft Cognitive Services is a suite of APIs using Machine Learning to understand images, sounds, text and enhance your projects to have a more human output and allow for human input
• Custom Recognition Service is a service by Microsoft to filter content by giving it context, thus improving the outcome of OCR or speech to text conversions
• Video Breakdown is a service to detect speakers, sentiments and create a transcript of videos
• My visit to the medical holodeck is my report about visiting Weill Cornell hospital in New York where they use VR for visualisation of diseases and HoloLens to design medication
• Sophia Roshal’s HoloLens demo shows the intern’s project at Weill Cornell using HoloLens to visualise cancer medication and tumor data
• Anamaria Cotîrlea is a Google employee whose research as an intern saves the company 1.5 petabytes of data each day by switching the Android store from gzip to brotli compression.
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk trained AI for years showing that a lot of the computer magic we see today is the result of human endeavours
• The next blue collar job is coding explains how a lot of soon-out-of-job workers re-educate themselves working in IT as it is the only really growing market

Yes, this was a lot – maybe too much – for one talk, but the feedback I got was all very positive, so I am hoping for the video to come out soon.