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Category Archives: Programming

Posted by heather
On Thursday January 31st at 04:15 PM

Jan 31

What You Get When You Enroll in HackerYou

We launched HackerYou in June 2012 and, admittedly, we’ve been thrilled with the response. There’s been so much demand for this style of learning experience that all of the courses we’ve offered so far have sold out. Applicants include journalists, writers, marketers, doctors, scientists, product managers, editors, recent grads, designers, community managers, account managers, entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs and more. And although this wasn’t an explicit goal, we’ve enjoyed a really nice balance of men and women at our courses: our Introduction to Web Development course in Fall 2012 was 83% female, and our current course, an Introduction to Ruby on Rails, is 44% female.

But these are just a few of the things that make HackerYou great. To be able to bring together a group of awesome, talented, forward-thinking people twice a week for three months so that they can build and hone an entirely new skill set – one that is going to come in handy for the rest of their professional lives – is a treat. But that’s what’s in it for me. What’s in it for you?

What do you really get when you enroll in HackerYou?

Allow me to elaborate, just in case this post has the potential to help you make the decision to apply to HackerYou before our next early bird deadline. Here’s what you’re in for if you decide to join us for a course:

1. 72 hours of in-class time (almost entirely dedicated to building stuff)

Whether you plan to do something entrepreneurial one day, want to stop paying other people to manage your personal or small business website, wish you could communicate more effectively with technical folks, or are looking to up your value as an employee…you should learn to code. And at HackerYou, that’s exactly what you’ll do. Each course is 72 hours long (price-wise, it’s just under $39 an hour) and you’ll spend almost all of that time actually writing code.

No matter what people say, making a time commitment (and a financial commitment) to learning a new skill can make a world of a difference. On your own, let’s say you can find an hour a week to dedicate to learning to code. At that rate, it will take you a year and five months to accomplish what will take you just three months to do at HackerYou. Plus, of course, at HackerYou, you’re guided by experts…but, more on that below.

2. A 10:1 ratio of students to instructors

Through our work with Ladies Learning Code, we’ve discovered that a small student-to-instructor ratio is the key to a great technical learning experience. At HackerYou, there isa 10:1 student-to-instructor ratio (or better!) at every class. Since classes are dedicated to writing code, it’s important that there are people there to help you when you get stuck. Or, for more advanced students, the mentors are there to challenge you by suggesting ways that you can deepen your learning by adding more complex functionality to your site. But what happens if you have a question outside of class? Well…

3. Seven-days-a-week access to the HackerYou community

Have a question outside of class? Never fear – as a HackerYou student, you’ll have seven-days-a-week access to the HackerYou forum. Using Lore‘s beautiful and elegant course management software, this forum is a place for you to interact with HackerYou instructors and mentors, myself and my team, and the other HackerYou students. As needed, we’ll add other experts to the site so that it can be a truly valuable resource for HackerYou students. And it doesn’t stop there – we’ll be creating a HackerYou Alumnni community as well, which you’ll become part of. It will become more and more valuable over time.

4. Unlimited HackerYou Workshops

When you sign up for a HackerYou course, your learning doesn’t just stop there. For the duration of your course, you have access to all of the workshops offered by HackerYou for free. We launch new workshops every week – for a list of workshops that are currently live, visit http://hackeryou.com/workshops.

5. An Introduction to the Best of Toronto’s Tech & Startup Community

Love the idea of going to more of Toronto’s tech and startup events, but not sure which ones are best? Or does showing up alone make you nervous? HackerYou students won’t have that problem, because we’ll curate the best events in the city, and head out to them as a group (optionally, of course). And if you want to learn something, but can’t find an event that will give you what you need? Let us know, and we’ll organize it, either just for HackerYou students, or for the broader community. It’s all part of our commitment to making HackerYou an amazing in-person learning experience, and something truly unique. But what if you need to meet someone really specific…

6. Trying to build a network? We’ll help with that.

Thanks again to Ladies Learning Code, we have a huge network of Toronto’s brightest entrepreneurs, developers, designers, illustrators, and more. Looking for a designer to join you for a passion project? Or need to pick the brains of successful entrepreneurs as you begin to plan your transition from corporate to startup life? We know people. If you’re looking for an introduction to someone really specific, we might be able to help with that, too. Try us.

7. Job Shadowing, If You Want It

As I’ve been chatting with the people who have applied to HackerYou (I meet everyone who applies for coffee), I’ve been asking them what would make their HackerYou course over-the-top awesome for them. A few people have mentioned job shadowing as something they’d be really interested in. So, we’re adding it to the program. If you want to job shadow someone (or someone in a certain job or company), let us know and we’ll set it up.

And, if you have other ideas for what would make HackerYou an even better learning experience, let us know! We’re up for the challenge.

8. HackerYou Demo Day

HackerYou participants have the opportunity to participate in a Demo Day at the end of the course (optionally, of course). This is our chance to show the people who say that you can’t learn to code in three months that they’re wrong. It’s a celebration, but it’s also about inspiring people who think that learning to code isn’t for them. Learning to code is for everyone, whether you want to become a professional or not.

9. A Guaranteed Internship

Most people who come to HackerYou aren’t looking for a job – they already have one, and they want to learn to code in order to enhance their chosen career. There are always a few people in each course, though, that are looking to use the skills they learn at HackerYou to land a new job. We’ll help them find one, but if they’re not quite ready, we’re happy to offer a guaranteed internship with HackerYou to students who graduate from the program. We tailor the internship to the role they’re seeking, but for example, here are two projects created by HackerYou interns: http://hackeryou.com/students and http://ladieslearningcode.com/map.

It’s all of that, and more.

If you’re ready to lean to code, and looking for the most comprehensive in-person learning experience around, you’re exactly who we’re looking for. Apply now.

Posted by heather
On Tuesday December 04th at 07:29 PM

Dec 04

Big Data Marketing Programming Ruby on Rails Why?

Why Marketers Will Rule The World: Rise of the Marketing Technologist

This post was written by Maggie Fox, Founder/CEO and CMO of Social Media Group. It was originally published by Social Media Today.

The average lifespan of the CMO has increased from 23 months in 2006 to over 43 months in 2012. Forbes magazine suggests this is a reflection of the growing strategic nature of the role – and there’s enormous opportunity to solidify this position by delivering measurable business results, thanks to big data. Technology is playing an important role in this. By 2017, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan predicts that CMOs will spend more money on technology than CIOs.

At the moment, however, most marketers are falling down on the job – badly, especially when it comes to technology. A recent survey from ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketingpaints a stark picture of marketers and their ownership of their own technology choices:

•    59% don’t specify marketing technology
•    45% don’t recommend marketing technology
•    46% don’t select marketing technology
•    15% DON’T HAVE ANY SAY AT ALL

This is a shockingly hands-off approach, and one that could very well come back and bite you if you allow it to continue. Just this past weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that suggested CIOs, not CMOs, should be responsible for digital leadership in most organizations. The article predicted that a new role, The Chief Digital Officer, would fall to IT because “IT is everywhere”. Russell Reynolds, one of the world’s top recruiting companies, describes the CDO as “[someone] who can oversee the full range of digital strategies and drive change across the organization.” (I don’t know about you, but that sounds like something marketing should own).

And it’s not just technology where marketers’ chops are being questioned: it’s also the ability to deliver business and operational intelligence (real-time insight into business performance); two things that are of enormous value to the entire organization, and two things that marketing is uniquely well-positioned to deliver in the digital age because of your access to that same massive data stream. In July, Oracle released a survey of more than 300 US and Canadian executives that showed 93% of them believe they’re losing revenue because they aren’t able to access or act on information already available to them. And they are missing out on something – the New York Times recently referenced a study of 179 large companies that found those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains of up to 6% – that couldn’t be explained any other way.

So what’s your opportunity? To blend the “Art and Science” of marketing; the art is the storytelling (something you’re so very good at) and the science is the technology and strategic business value that you can deliver by leveraging big data generated by social media and other customer interactions online. This is a wellspring of fantastic intelligence, if you have the technologies and skillsets to process and analyze it. In Inc. Magazine, Brian Halligan recently described it as delivering to a “segment of one” – think about sites like Netflix and Amazon, which use a combination of individual leverage (the more I use the site, the more it learns about me) and group leverage (the more people like me use the site, the better the site can predict what I may want or like) to deliver a better customized, higher-revenue experience.

There are many examples of marketers who have leveraged big data in order to deliver business value. Steve McKee, who writes for BusinessWeek, has written about how his team took a look at simple web metrics and their relationships, the increases and decreases in media buys, and used that data to increase the effectiveness of a clients’ media spend by 9%. Pamplin College in the U.S. did a large-scale study to see what the relationship was between social media mentions and automotive recalls, and found a direct, predictive connection.

One of the biggest challenges behind turning social media data into business and operational intelligence is the need to make structured and unstructured data play nicely together (structured data is the stuff that’s easy to put into a database – often things like sales numbers, or numbers of clicks; things that are easy to count and don’t require any interpretation. Unstructured data, however, are text-heavy, things like conversations and facts. Unstructured data is irregular and requires analysis to be understood by everyone – it’s complicated). This will require skillsets you are unlikely to see in a typical marketing department today (unless you’re Target). McKinsey predicts that in the U.S. alone, right now there’s a need for 200,000 people with skillsets in data analytics. And the way you attack data will also need to change; Avinash Kaushik, Google’s digital marketing evangelist says that the ideal breakdown for big data resources should be 15% data capture, 20% reporting and 65% analysis. At the moment, for most of us, that’s flipped, with most resources devoted to capture and very little to analysis and actionable insight.

So what’s next? Like many others, I think it’s the age of the Marketing Technologist – the person who, in the words of Scott Brinker, is “Someone who has a hybrid between business and technology, a strong background in engineering and IT, is an early adopter of technology, but someone who also understands the pragmatic realities of scaling technology. But most importantly, someone who brings those skills and combines them with a deep love and passion for the marketing mix. This is a technologist that reports to the CMO, not the CIO.”

What do you think? And, even more importantly – are you ready?

[A note from Heather: If you ask me, this sounds like a great reason for marketers to learn to code! Check out our upcoming Ruby on Rails course for an exciting opportunity to learn to code after work hours beginning in January 2013.]

Posted by heather
On Tuesday November 20th at 12:36 PM

Nov 20

Programming Ruby on Rails Why?

10 reasons why you should learn Ruby on Rails

This post was originally written by Justin James for Tech Republic.

Takeaway: There are plenty of compelling reasons to check out Ruby on Rails — like the development model, the job market, and the abundance of good IDEs.

Ruby on Rails has been out now for a number of years, but lately its popularity has gone up quite a bit. I recently started digging deeply into Rails and the Rails ecosystem, and I found a lot to like. Here are 10 reasons why you should consider learning Rails.

1. The Ruby language itself

The Ruby language is pretty impressive. It combines some of the best features of dynamic languages, while taking some of the best ideas from strongly typed, static languages and blending them with an object-oriented paradigm that is focused on “getting things done” and not “writing lots of code.” The Ruby language is an excellent language, and you may very well find it makes you quite productive.

2. Code-based data model

In Ruby on Rails, you define your data model with code. In fact, once the initial data model is made, any changes to it are made through scripts that manipulate the model. While this may feel a little unusual, it means that it is trivial to replicate a Rails project on another server or even target it against another database.

3. Open source

Rails (and Ruby) are not just “open source,” they have a thriving, helpful community around them. Although the magic of open source is often overstated, the reality of Ruby and Rails is close to the ideal, which is great for new developers.

4. Well documented

You may not see a row of Ruby or Rails books at your local bookstore, but Ruby and Rails are both well documented. I’ve been very impressed by the amount of video tutorials available on the Web, both for free and for pay. Not only are there lots of these tutorials, but they are often of high quality, fun to follow, and much more effective than most books.

5. Good jobs

Rails may not have a pile of open positions, but the Rails jobs I have seen advertised all look attractive. I’ve talked to a number of recruiters and people running Rails shops, and the general attitude is that the superior efficiency allows them to pay a bit more and still save money. Also, the lack of experts means that they often employ people who work from home or otherwise get benefits that a .NET or Java developer would be hard pressed to get.

6. Rapid development model

The Rails development model depends upon convention, not configuration. This means that if you learn to do things the way Rails expects you to do them, it will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. This applies to a wide variety of development tasks, and as long as you keep yourself from trying to micromanage Rails, you can work very quickly in it.

7. Direct access to the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

Rails makes no presumptions about how to turn your logic into output. Instead, you get 100% control over the presentation layer of your code. This makes tying your application’s logic to AJAX’ed front ends mighty easy. It also allows you to work closely with design experts, to produce nice looking sites that are difficult to do in less-flexible systems.

8. Vendor support

Is Rails available on every host out there? Not at all. But most hosts do offer it now. Even better, a number of them now specialize in Rails hosting and can provide a high level of service and support. In fact, Engine Yard employs a significant number of developers who are core members of the Rails and Ruby teams, giving them a massive amount of in-house knowledge of the product. As a result of specialization, you can get great help from these vendors, in stark contrast to the experience that most vendors typically provide.

9. Tool options

The relative simplicity of the Rails system means that there are already a number of good IDEs for Rails development. In addition to IDEs, the Rails ecosystem is filled with excellent tools that fill just about any need you may have, and most of them are free and/or open source. If you want to work in an ecosystem with topflight tools support, Rails is a good place to be.

10. Better fit

There is something distinct about the Rails philosophy (and toolset) in comparison to the Java or .NET environments. If you are the type of person who “thinks in code” and likes to work with scripts to get things done, Rails may be a great fit for you. While the focus on command-line tools may feel like a quaint anachronism, this mode of working simply suits some people better. There is a good possibility that you will find yourself very comfortable working in the Rails style, and it is worth your time to check it out.

Your take

Have you worked with Ruby on Rails? What did you like/dislike the most?

Posted by heather
On Tuesday November 06th at 04:05 PM

Nov 06

Learn to code Programming Why?

Could coding be the next mass profession?

This post was originally published by Roy Bahat on his blog, Also.

Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value.

Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get any advanced degree. In the past, students who missed out on a higher education learned vocational skills – but this stuttered as we moved to an information economy. Today, students without a higher education generally enter service professions or trades where employment, if they can get it, doesn’t offer much career growth.

There is a new opportunity emerging for young people to do productive, entrepreneurial, satisfying work: they can learn to code. Code isn’t that hard to start to learn – one outsourcing firm takes people with no training and makes them full-time Java programmers in 3 months. (Of course, mastery takes tremendous talent and craft.) Coding isn’t expensive – with netbooks, cloud hosting and storage, and open source software. Beyond a certain point, coders are self-taught, and can continue to advance their skills.

They’re handing out Gutenberg printing presses out there: with services like Treehouse (I’m a dues-paying member) and Codecademy (and its expertly-timed year of code), countless university courses free online, Google Code University, the warm embrace of Stack Overflow, in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp,summer camps for kids, even the promise of a one-day result withDecoded (the six-minute abs of learning to code), and great organizations like CodeNow (which I’ve been supporting) reaching out to teach code in underserved communities. I’m sure I’ve left many out.

Yet very few high school students learn to code. Almost no high schools teach code as part of the curriculum. Though of course they should — code is literacy, not (just) a specialist skill. And kids can get started coding early. Many students who would be terrific at coding, a creative, tinkering act, also may not thrive in institutional (school) environments.

There is real demand for coders – even despite overall unemployment – so learning to code produces rewards quickly. Online marketplaces like oDesk and Elance hire starting programmers at rates as high as $15-20 an hour or more. Learning to code is one of the best paths to entrepreneurship. Coding also offers students the joy of creation and mastery of a complex skill. Code may one day be a basic workplace expectation– like emailing, or “proficient in Word.” Young people are also willing to learn: coding now has a brand. The kid who writes an iPhone or Android app, these days, gets the girl (or boy!).

It might even be possible to do more than just learn to code – but also to become an elite coder – without necessarily going to college. We are in the early days of teaching code as a profession. Most academic training is focused on teaching students theory, not practice. (One Ivy League computer science program only required one course where students actually write code.) Imagine if students who might not otherwise even attend college could become elite coders.

In the U.S., the STEM line of thinking is about creating the next generation of scientists. In computing, this is even reflected in what we call the study of programming — computer “science.” We could be doing something different (and complementary), teaching students to be makers, not scientists: creating the next generation who can hack, beget, get paid right away, and maybe become entrepreneurs. Learning this would make the high school experience more rewarding, because it would have an immediate result. (I went to a high school with a vocational tradition, Stuyvesant in New York, and wish I had more courses like the architectural drafting class I took for a year.)

I’ve become personally passionate about this idea over the last couple of years. I think it could be a path to helping fix a lot of what doesn’t work right now: our ways of teaching students, powering our economy’s future, and making work a creative and fulfilling way to spend time.

I’m sure there are many more out there working on this — if you’re one of them, hit me up and let’s find a way to make common cause. And if you think I’m crazy, tell me why.

Posted by heather
On Friday November 02nd at 01:06 PM

Nov 02

From our Instructors Learn to code Programming Projects Ruby on Rails

Introducing the Rails Course Projects: Hacklendar & Hackboard

It’s been an exciting few months at HackerYou. We’re more than halfway through our first (sold out!) 72-hour course (an Introduction to Front-End Web Development), we’ve organized a few dozen workshops (teaching everything from HTML and CSS to 3D printing) and, a couple weeks ago, we announced that applications are now open for our second 72-hour course: an Introduction to Ruby on Rails!

About the HackerYou Intro to Rails Course

Beginning on January 21st, 2012, and running every Monday and Thursday for 12 weeks (skipping the week of February 18th, of course – it’s Spring Break!), 30 students will have the opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails from the ground up, with the help of two incredibly talented and passionate developers as their Lead Instructors: Ryan Brunner and Brad Robertson from Influitive. (If you want to take them for a test drive, they’ll be leading an Intro to Ruby course for Ladies Learning Code on December 8th. You heard it here first.)

[Of course, at HackerYou, there's always a student-to-instructor ratio of 10:1 or better, so Ryan and Brad will be joined at each class by one or more talented developers from Toronto's Rails community. If you want to be one of those Assistant Instructors or "mentors" (as we like to call them), please get in touch! Note that it is a paid gig.]

What You’ll Build

HackerYou is all about hands-on, project-based learning, which is why we take the selection of projects to work on during the course really seriously. They have to be challenging (but not too challenging), and they also have to be fun, personal and customizable. We think we hit the nail on the head with the projects we’ve selected for our first Rails course: Hacklendar and Hackboard.

Join us in 2013 and learn the fundamentals of Ruby on Rails by building the following applications from scratch. Note that beginners are 100% welcome! Learn more about the course here.

Hacklendar (http://hacklendar.herokuapp.com)

Hacklendar is a calendar app that allows you to track your progress toward a goal. Check out a live demo here (and feel free to add new entries!): http://hacklendar.herokuapp.com

Hackboard (http://hackboard.herokuapp.com)

Hackboard is a Pinterest-style application that includes functionality like Twitter login, photo upload, and comments. Check out a live demo here (and feel free to add new boards and posts): http://hackboard.herokuapp.com

Thanks to Ryan, Brad and Breanna for conceptualizing these projects and bringing them to life. I know I can speak for all of us when I say that we are incredibly excited to bring together 30 beginners in January and teach them how to build these Rails apps from scratch. It’s going to be an adventure. Now the only question is…when are you going to submit an application?

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Get in touch on Twitter (we’re @thisishackeryou) or by email at info [at] hackeryou.com.

Posted by heather
On Tuesday September 11th at 10:03 AM

Sep 11

Learn to code Programming Startups Why?

If You Want To Be The Donald Trump Of Startups, Learn To Code

This post was originally published on September 11th by Fast Company. Written by Rob Spectre.

The Donald built an empire because he knew what every piece and process cost him. If you can’t say the same for your software, you won’t.

Programming is a practical application of abstract math combining esoteric theory with experiential practice. And learning it can be every bit as brain-scramblingly incomprehensible and front-row-seat-for-Celine-Dion tedious as the previous sentence suggests.

But, if you want to start a technology company, you should learn to code. And the reason is Donald Trump.

Say whatever you want about the man (and, as a New Yorker, I can say plenty), Donald Trump achieved no small level of success in the real estate business. His real estate portfolio stretching from sea to shining sea, including a good-sized chunk of Manhattan, skyline causing Forbes to estimate his worth at $2.9 billion. He sits at #134 of that publication’s list of wealthiest people in the United States, fomenting a serious bit of celebrity and funding a less serious flirtation with the White House. All this without the ability to get through a press conference with a single complete sentence or eat a New York slice correctly. How is a man whose public image is punctuated by obtuseness able to out-earn quite nearly anybody who reads this article by orders of magnitude?

If you were to ask him the secret to his success, he would point to a competitive edge handed down to him by his father: he knew what everything cost. Meaning he could look at a foundation and given its size, the type of concrete used, the techniques involved and a few other factors, Trump’s old man had a rough sense of how much he should pay. His son often says that knowledge–the knowledge of what everything costs–is the linchpin of the Trump empire’s success. When looking at that ability across all that goes into real estate development, it is little wonder.

Demolition, architecture, plumbing, electrical work, heating, air conditioning, permits, labor, interior design, lumber, dry wall, 12 foot tall golden letters spelling your own last name–Trump’s big edge is he knows the going rate for all of it. There are hundreds of details that go into turning a hunk of capital into a building; Donald Trump wins because he knows what all those details cost. And his competitors don’t.

Reconsider, then, why you should learn to program as a non-technical founder. In our current environment, your most precious resource is not money–it is time. With a macroeconomy still allocating capital to angel and venture at a rate disproportionate with the risk those asset classes represent, a wealth of cloud services that bring down the capital expenditure needed to build a software company to near zero, and a market for developer talent hotter than the surface of the Sun, days of developer time have eclipsed American dollars as the most valuable commodity in the startup game.

Why learn how to program? Because you’ll learn how much time everything should take. Will sharing content on Facebook take more time than authenticating with Twitter? Is it more development effort to implement a recommendation engine or add full-text search? If a developer hands you a login page written in an afternoon, is it quality work? Will rewriting the site in Ruby really only take three months?

It is true what they say about learning to code–it is easier or cheaper than ever before. But for the born hustler well removed from college whose recollection of algebra is as fuzzy as the name of the junior high cafeteria lady, programming is still a damn difficult thing to get a handle on. The difficulty curve from understanding programming fundamentals like variables and conditional logic to producing your first web page is steeper than the hockey stick growth you’re expecting with your company. Scaling this mountain is further complicated by the realities of coding for a modern Web where–bare minimum–you’ll need comprehension of four different languages to do anything and five if you want to do anything important. And this is to say nothing of the hundred odd operational obstacles you’ll also need to hurdle to get the code from your laptop to a domain name where anyone on the Internet can pay you with a credit card.

However, if you do learn to program, you–not your technical co-founder, not your first engineering hire, but you–will have a good sense of the answer. You may not be able to do it yourself, but you will have a far better sense of how long it would take for a professional. You will know what software costs. And in the startup business, the people who know what software costs tend to be the biggest winners.

Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Larry Page. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. By the time they were billionaires, they were each likely as useful committing code as they were mopping the floor. But when any of them were presented with a feature, they knew about how much development time it should take. And the knowledge of that cost coupled with their singular intuition for their customers’ needs and vision for the market propelled them to the decisions that would build world-changing companies.

The bald truth is learning to program is still hard, despite recent gains in accessibility. And to pile on to the bad news, programming is a lot harder for a father to pass to his son than a contractor’s proposal. The only way you can ever learn how much time development is going to take–how much the software you wish to build will cost–is by building some yourself.

There are few CEOs who know the cost of building great software. Those who do hold a stark competitive advantage over the legions who don’t. And if there is anything we could possibly learn from a guy like Donald Trump, that edge can be all you need to build a fortune.

Rob Spectre hacks at Twilio, blogs at Brooklyn Hacker, and tweets @dN0t.

Posted by heather
On Monday June 25th at 03:25 PM

Jun 25

Learn to code Marketing Programming Startups Why?

Want a Marketing Job at a Startup? Better Learn to Code!

This post was originally published on June 23rd on the Onboardly blog. Written by Renee Warren.

Reginald Braithwaite once wrote about “[...] having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever.” Clearly, learning to code is no small feat. Hundreds of students spend years and thousands of dollars to learn how to code. And for good reason! According to HackerYou, “there’s never been more energy around the importance of learning to code.”

It seems like everyone wants to discuss who should be learning to code. It’s the latest trend for non-programmers to learn. In fact, there are even specific resources and workshops for women who want to learn, entrepreneurs who want to learn, children who want to learn – you get the idea. Of course, marketers are among this seemingly endless list of people who must learn to code.

Andrew Chen made it even more apparent in his post Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing, stating that “coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer in Silicon Valley.” Though he refers to this new position as Growth Hacker, it still emphasizes the increasing need for technical experience as a marketer. This doesn’t just mean a basic HTML or some CSS understanding, this is full on Ruby or Python experience. “The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs”, says Chen.

Well, it’s not just another trend. Digital marketers, especially those working at startups, absolutely need to learn to code. Here are just four reasons why:

1. Small Teams

Startups are small and close-knit. As a startup marketer, you’re going to know what everyone else is working on and you’re likely going to be involved. Realistically, you can’t be a marketer for a startup without understanding the basics behind your landing pages, website, blog, etc.

How would you have an intelligent conversation with the programmers? How would you coordinate between a programmer and the CEO if you only really understand one side of the equation (the business side)? Knowing how to interpret and become involved in “geek speak” is a must for startup marketers.

2. Coding Is Digital

When you think about it, coding is what makes digital marketing possible to begin with. Without coding, most startup marketers would be out of a job. Justin Pearse calls coding “the building block” for everything online marketers do. Perhaps that’s why senior staff from brands like Unilever, Bacardi and BBC have attended coding workshops like Decoded. After all, in order to build a sound structure, you need to know a little something about laying bricks.

In order to build a sound structure, you need to know a little something about laying bricks.

3. Generalists Wanted

There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s better for startups to hire specialists or generalists. Early stage startups, for the most part, prefer to work with generalists. That is, they want employees who are good at a lot of things, not experts at just one thing. Why? The team gets more done for less money. Consider the efficiency and expenses associated with managing a design expert, a social media expert, a Google AdWords expert, and a programming expert.

So, not only do you need to be able to “speak geek”, but you need to be able to get your hands dirty too. A working knowledge of multiple areas will allow you to help out here and there, making adjustments and optimizations where you see fit. Coding is the backbone of everything digital, which means you’ll want to be able to include it under your generalist umbrella.

4. Digital Is Life

In 2010, ecommerce sales increased 12.6% to $176.2 billion. By 2015, experts are predicting sales to reach $278.9 billion. Nine years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Today, if it were a country, it would be the world’s third largest. There’s just no doubt that the digital world is becoming more and more ingrained in day-to-day life. As more online startups sprout up, we’ll see more jobs in the digital space as well. In fact, a recent study showed that 83% of respondents telecommute at least part of the day.

Since we’ve already determined that coding is digital and now that digital is life, it might be a good idea to understand coding before the need completely overwhelms you. Imagine trying to do your job without a working knowledge of email. In a few years, coding will be the new email. Unfortunately, history is full of people who have lost their jobs because they couldn’t adapt to changing technology. Get a head start!

You don’t need to be a coding expert, but you do need a working knowledge. If marketers can’t edit a website, update the behind-the-scenes of a blog or add SEO parameters to a landing page, they’re inefficient. And when it comes to startups, there’s no room for inefficiency. Learning to code, even on the most basic level, empowers marketers. It makes them more valuable now and more prepared for the future.

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Want to be the person startups dream about hiring? Join us for an Intro to Web Development this fall, and learn how to build websites from scratch. Combine that with your marketing savvy, and you’re all set! Apply before June 30th for earlybird pricing.

Posted by heather
On Friday June 15th at 03:10 PM

Jun 15

Learn to code Programming Startups

Grads: Skip the Bank Job, Join a Startup

This post was originally published on June 13th on Bloomberg View. Written by Ezra Klein.

Dartmouth College has four valedictorians this year: Wills Begor, Glynnis Kearney, David Rogg and Jie Zhong. They are impressive kids. All have stratospheric GPAs. Most pulled off two majors and a minor. One developed a new social networking platform for the iPhone.

So what are they doing next? Investment banking, mostly. Begor is headed to Morgan Stanley. Rogg and Zhong are headed to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Kearney is the rebel. She’s going to McKinsey & Co.

That’s no surprise. After all, 39 percent of Harvard’s 2010 graduating class went to work in finance or management consulting. At Columbia, it was 34 percent. Nothing against finance or management consulting, but do they really need such a big chunk of our best and brightest?

Two years ago, Mike Mayer appeared headed in the same direction. A high school valedictorian, he attended the University of Pennsylvania. As a sophomore, he worried he wasn’t learning usable skills, so he switched into an undergraduate program at the Wharton School and, as he puts it, “followed the herd into the finance concentration, and then into New York and Wall Street.” Last summer, he worked at Credit Suisse Group AG as a research analyst. They quickly offered him a job, which he turned down. Instead, Mayer signed on with Venture for America, a young startup with a slightly odd mission.

‘Meta Economy’

Venture for America is the brainchild of Andrew Yang, a charismatic former lawyer. “We’ve got the best universities in the world,” Yang says. “We have the talent. But our best and brightest are being absorbed by what I call ‘the meta economy.’ They’re heading into professional services and transactions and optimizing but not into direct value creation. If you can imagine a country where the equivalent wave of talent currently heading to professional services was heading to fast-growing companies, think about what that would do for job creation.”

Yang got the idea for Venture for America while running Manhattan GMAT, a test-preparation company that was acquired by the Washington Post/Kaplan in 2009. (I work for the Washington Post.) “I saw there was a huge pool of investment bankers and management consultants who weren’t very happy in their jobs and didn’t know what they wanted to do next,” he said. “So they would come to us because they were taking the GMAT to go to business school. Then, after business school, they would have a debt load to pay off and would end up being recruited to the same firms. But they were looking for something.”

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that enticing Ivy League graduates to work at a for-profit business can now be sold as a way to “give back” to the community — on the grounds that the job isn’t in finance or management consulting and isn’t in New York or Boston. Yet that’s Yang’s pitch. “Let’s say you were to place 20 teachers in Detroit,” he says. “That would be a great thing. But if you could place 20 entrepreneurs in Detroit and have each start a business, that would also be incredible for Detroit. These regions need our top people helping to build businesses and create opportunities.”

The conventional wisdom is that the flood of top students to management consulting and finance is basically irreversible. Those industries pay so much, are in such desirable cities, can hire so many graduates, and have such deep alumni networks on campuses that small businesses simply can’t compete with them for top talent.

At least, that was the conventional wisdom. Then Teach for America came along and upended it, attracting 48,000 applicants — including 12 percent of Ivy League seniors — for 5,200 annual spots, none of which pay well and most of which are in cities that are decidedly not New York or Boston. The electric response to Teach for America convinced Yang that graduating seniors wanted more options. They just weren’t sure how to find them.

Young Businesses

Venture for America intends to correct that. You might have heard that small businesses create the majority of jobs. Recent research by John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda for the U.S. Census Bureau disproved that. It’s young businesses that create jobs. “Once we control for firm age there is no systematic relationship between firm size and growth,” the authors conclude.

Think about a young business. Usually, it’s small and obscure, with little brand equity. Its founders are probably extremely busy, particularly if their business is succeeding and has the potential to create a lot of jobs in the future. And the company probably has only a couple of positions to be filled at any given time.

That’s pretty much the opposite of big banks and management consulting firms, which have many open positions, many employees who can do recruiting and deep brand equity on every Ivy League campus. “It’s the organizations with the most resources that get the best talent,” Yang says, “while the young businesses that will be creating all the jobs don’t get the talent they need.”

Teach for America solved that problem by providing schools across the country with the recruiting capacity and brand equity they lacked, enabling them to pool resources to attract top students. Venture for America is eager to play a similar role, serving as the middleman between small, growing businesses and students who might want to work for them.

In its first year, Yang estimates that Venture for America received about 500 applications for 40 slots. The jobs are in fast-growing companies that are less than 10 years old, and they pay from $32,000 to $38,000. Right now, Venture for America is working with companies in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Providence, Rhode Island. Next year, the organization expects to have more than a thousand applicants for 100 positions, allowing expansion to Baltimore; Cleveland; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

As for Mike Mayer, he’s finished with Wharton and heading to New Orleans to work at a small software company. “There is a sense of creating something, of creating real tangible value,” he says. “A big bank does create value for our economy, but as a first-year analyst among 80 or 90 peers, you’re not seeing it. At a startup, you’re seeing it every day.”

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Want to join a startup, but feel like you don’t have the right skills? Join us for an Intro to Web Development this fall, and learn how to build websites from scratch. Combine that with your design skills, your vision or your hustle, and you’re all set! Apply before June 30th for earlybird pricing.

Posted by heather
On Monday June 11th at 12:15 PM

Jun 11

Learn to code Programming Why?

Learn to code, but don’t quit your day job

This post was originally published on May 17th on The Verge. Written by Joshua Kopstein.

Given the ever-expanding role of software in our lives, it shouldn’t be too difficult to ascertain why so many people have been exuberantly advocating learning computer programming recently. This idea that everyone should learn to code — practiced at new websites like Codecademy and preached by media cheerleaders like Douglas Rushkoff and Tim O’Reilly — has become practically meme-like. At its best, it has sparked a long-overdue conversation about the importance of understanding and participating in the complex systems being built around us. But the philosophy recently found an interesting opponent in noted programmer and blogger Jeff Atwood, who earlier this week argued the contrary: that average folks shouldn’t bother learning to code, unless they’re planning on making a career out of it.

Atwood, best known as the father of StackOverflow, was quickly called out by several of his peers. His argument rests on the assertion that for average people, coding is a specialized, non-essential skill. Citing an odd and probably inconsequential tweet from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he irreverently compares the call to program with a call to learn plumbing, saying that among other things it “falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math.” But in doing so he fails to account for an important point that perhaps, admittedly, these coding initiatives haven’t been great at communicating: that “learning to code” and “becoming a programmer” are not the same thing, and that doing the former in a time when software encapsulates nearly everything we do is personally empowering.

And yes, it’s okay — you can do one and not the other. In fact, you should.

Learning to code simply means having a basic grasp of how computers work instead of blindly following whatever a talking paperclip tells you.

“I can’t think of many other skills that enable you to create something from scratch and reach as many people as knowing how to set up a simple website,” writes CodeYear designer Sacha Greif in response to Atwood’s post. “‘Learning to code’ doesn’t always mean becoming the next Linus Torvalds, just like ‘learning to cook’ doesn’t mean opening a 3-stars restaurant. It simply means having a basic grasp of how computers work instead of blindly following whatever a talking paperclip tells you.”

Atwood raises points about the unfortunate tendency to write code for the sake of writing code, rather than to actually solve problems. But coding isn’t necessarily a solution in search of a problem — it’s a kind of literacy, a mindset which, when properly utilized, can be applied anywhere there’s software (or anywhere there’s not). In the end, Atwood’s “stay out of the kitchen” attitude in response to this new wave of free coding resources and training doesn’t fully corroborate with most of his points. Instead, it seems to boil down to a discouraging diatribe from a curmudgeonly (though very often brilliant) code veteran raised on the “old way” of computer science classes and textbook learning.

“If you don’t know how to program, you filter out all parts of the world that involve programming,” reads another response on Github. “Yes, I can “see the code” behind my phone and know that poor memory management, not the mercurial favor of the Gods caused that app to crash hard. But this is only because I understand programming. I am only able to function in this digital wasteland of convenience — and not be dragged along sipping a slurpy — because my search space for problem solving and perception has been expanded by my learning to code.”

Atwood’s rant has generated a lot of interesting and impassioned discussion which you should read, including one rebuttal that sits smack-dab in the middle. Be sure to also check out some of the responses on Hacker News.

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Posted by heather
On Thursday June 07th at 10:57 AM

Jun 07

Programming Why?

Six Reasons a Non-Computer Nerd Might Want to Learn to Code

This post was originally published on The Atlantic Wire. Written by Rebecca Greenfield.

Though coder Jeff Atwood thinks coding isn’t for non-computer geeks, we can think of a lot of reasons normals should learn computer language. Atwood, on his blog Coding Horror, miffed by the “everyone should learn to code” meme, likens coding to plumbing. It’s not for everyone. “Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people,” he writes. “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?” Wrong. With the help of an angry comment thread on Hacker News, we can think of at least five ways someone who has no professional programming ambitions might want to learn a little bit about the way the machines we use every single day, some of us all day, work.

1. It’s like learning to read or write. “Learning to code is to being a professional programmer as learning to write is to being a journalist/editor,” wrote commenter danso, echoing the sentiments of a lot of the Hacker News commenters. Just because one does not aspire to professional programmer status, does not mean that they can’t have these basic skills. “There was once a time when books were only read and written by an elite group. Now everyone can read – and everyone can write. There are still the elite authors that write better than the rest of us. Just because everyone can write, doesn’t mean everyone is trying to be a professional author,” added commenter jkahn. Programmer man Atwood might like if the rest of us remain ignorant, so he can continue being an “expert”, but they do say knowledge is power.

2. It’s useful, even outside of computer geek circles. As a blogger, it sometimes feels like coding would be a useful tool, as we sit in front of these machines all day. And, really, anyone who works on a computer might find some utility in learning how they operate. One commenter on Hacker news commented he saved his business $2 million a year, by writing a program. ”The key was combining knowledge of the business processes with some knowledge of programming. There were people with knowledge of one or the other, but not both,” commenter SatvikBerry explains. Another commenter describes how it helped him in his marketing profession. Another suggested a knowledge of Excel Macros or other scripting would be especially useful for any office worker. Plus, having a skill nobody else has will give office worker bees a leg up in this already tough economy. (Perhaps Atwood’s fear stems from that fear — he doesn’t want to lose his competitive advantage.)

3. It’s helps you talk to actual programmers. If you drive a car, it’s a good idea to know what the carburetor and other parts of the engine do if for no other reason that you have some idea of what your mechanic is talking about. Some passing knowledge of code may not make you a coder, just like changing a sparkplug doesn’t make you a mechanic. But it is helpful if you ever have to talk to one.

4. It’s a fun hobby. Seriously. Just head on over to the Codecademy. It’s pretty addictive. If you like learning languages or math, it has that same feel. Also, as many pointed out on the Hacker News thread, coding can be just that: a hobby. One doesn’t need to go full on programmer.

5. Computers are a part of society. At this point, one feels a little ignorant for not knowing how a computer works. Yet, so many of us don’t know the basic language running our favorite blogs and social networks and whatever else we do on here. With just a tiny bit of coder knowledge we can change that.

6. It teaches other skills. Science has shown making kids learn piano makes them better at math. Parents don’t force piano lessons on their kids hoping they’ll turn into concert pianists — unless they’re Tiger Moms, whose kids really do turn into big deal piano players. But, the point is it teaches other important skills. Learning to code works like that. “Learning programming has helped me in many other walks of life,” writes commenter Andrest. “It has taught me that every problem can be tackled with a systematic approach, given enough time. I like to think that helps me to notice things that would have gone unnoticed without. More than anything else, it is this approach, enforced by programming, for which I hold gratitude. Critical thinking,” he continues. See, useful.

Plus, no matter what coding elitist Atwood thinks, the regulars have already started learning basic computer plumbing. Since starting Code Year, a New Year’s resolution to learn code in 2012, the Codecademy has signed up 440,722 amateurs, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It’s happening.
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