The Twelve-Second Code Year [part 2]

(I’m taking an intensive web development bootcamp. Part 1 of the story. Names of students have been changed.)

4.

A great man once told me that learning to code is like learning to cook if you’ve never eaten food before. It’s totally abstract, and without any frame of reference that tells you when you’re on the right lines, when you’ve made something that works. So don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re struggling.

Sometimes we all need to hear that. Roi, now a teacher at Makers, tells me that when he took the course, he felt stupid every day for twelve weeks. Constantly feeling dumb is hard, and it’s easy to let pride stop you from reaching out for help.

K spoke to Enrique, Head of Education, about the course. He’s worried he’s falling behind, and wanted to know if there were any ways to learn more efficiently. “Forget ‘working smarter’,” Enrique told him. “Just work harder. Put the hours in.”

I think it’s advice many of us need to hear – that there’s no secret to getting good at this stuff, and nothing magical separating the top of the class from the bottom. You sit down at your computer and make the clackity noise until you get good. Skill acquisition is more democratic than you think. Sometimes I want to remind people of that.

5.

Just as a cook needs to know about the chemistry of baking to turn ingredients into a meal, a coder needs to know how to turn problems into something a computer can understand.

Jordan, the endlessly charismatic Director of Marketing at Makers, introduced this by comparing object-oriented programming to Platonic forms. Classes are a mould, in whose image objects can be created. These objects inherit properties from their parent class – this tells them who they are, what they know and what they can do – but these objects can themselves be extended and built upon.

Understanding this, and how objects relate to each other in a program, was one of the biggest headfucks our cohort came across. But bending your problem like this, organising it into interdependent classes which do things to each other, is the first step in building sotware.

6.

At school and university, I always thought Chemistry was one of the more testing subjects. It involved real understanding – wrapping your brain around totally foreign ideas. There was a distinct sense of seeing ‘in your peripheral vision’, in a sense; not quite visible head-on, but understandable on some primal level. The moment when those concepts shift into focus is like feeling your brain rewiring itself.

I haven’t had one of those moments for a long time. Much of my degree was memorisation, and the world of work that followed proved to be mostly intellectually uninspiring, a couple of interesting stints excepted. But working on a code problem and, after hours of rumination, having the answer seemingly present itself to you is truly sublime.

And as a beginner, there are few better languages in which to see this happen than Ruby. Powerful, elegant, and expressive – I can see why people fall in love with it.

(To be continued.)

Why Hailo works

Hailo is a London-based tech startup. Its product is a mobile app that lets you find and hail a nearby taxi.

It’s not the first or last cab-hailing app, but it’s best-in-class after a few years and is now also available in a number of other cities around the world. The founders describe themselves as “three taxi drivers and three internet entrepreneurs.”

From a customer’s point of view, Hailo fixes a lot of problems that cabs have: sometimes-surly drivers, a pick-up charge, waving one’s arm trying to find a cab, having to pay in cash. And it gives benefits to drivers, too: one taxi driver told me that Hailo had revolutionised his business.

The company’s success hinges on:

• The uniqueness of the product. Hailo has avoided competing with cheaper minicab firms – which rapidly devolves into cutting fares in a race to the bottom – by putting itself into a different product category: the rides on offer are all licensed black taxis, the kind you’d hail from the kerb, which means the drivers have all passed The Knowledge (a formidable test of their navigation acumen, usually involving 3-4 years of training) and are veterans in navigating London’s winding streets and treacherous traffic. Black cabs also hold five people, unlike a sedan. And as there are already lots of black cabs roaming the streets looking for passengers, there’s usually one nearby.
• The quality of the user experience. When a customer hails a cab and a driver accepts the job, the app provides the user with its live location, the driver’s name, photo and phone number, the cab’s numberplate and its ETA.
• The quality of the product. Rather than stand on the street trying to find a cab, users can hail one while inside. Users are sent a text when the cab is one minute away, and again when it’s outside. The taxi will wait outside for five minutes before starting the meter. Customers can pay by credit or debit card, which they can pre-register using the app, tapping in their desired tip when the ride is over. When they walk away from the cab, users are asked to rate their ride out of five.
• Appeal to taxi drivers, who spend large portions of their day with their cabs empty, looking for work. The driver app runs on an iPhone, which is considerably cheaper than the equipment that radio taxi firms require drivers to rent out. One driver pointed out to me the flexibility of being able to take extra work during quiet times and not when e.g. on holiday – there are no subscription fees, only a per-ride commission. The service also feeds useful data back to drivers, like traffic alerts and job bursts (such as a crowd of theatregoers all requesting cabs after the Sunday matinée: drivers are now alerted and can get there pronto).

The thing that struck me the most while thinking about this was how elegantly Hailo addresses the pains of both taxi users and taxi drivers.

Notes from FutureFest

FutureFest was yesterday. Here are some (very rough) notes from the talks I heard.

Rachel Armstrong: black sky thinking. Not sure what’s going on here. Organic, natural computing and chemistry. Other audience members nearby seemed befuddled.

Tamar Kasriel: business planning for future growth in the face of uncertainly. Scenario planning: Kahn broke apart the way the future is thought of by asking what the world would look like after nuclear way. What about personal scenario planning? Applying business futures to one’s personal life. Accept uncertainty, be objective/distant, treat it as a process that won’t happen by itself. Such planning can be a good defence against regret. Thinking far out can depersonalise planning.

Rohan Gunatillake: meditation is a mirror to the mind. Lots of tech exists for fostering mindfulness. But how do we develop eg websites, social networks aimed at increasing human happiness/wellbeing? How do we design interfaces to reward patience? How do we make email more connective? What about wearable technology that reminds people of their physicality? Is a ‘technoptimist’. The web is 22-33; when Rohan was that age he was interested in sex, money and status. The web is the same. As people grow with time and through crises, so the internet will develop.

Kathy Hinde: Open scores allowed musicians to play a ‘choose your own adventure’ piece. A little bit on emergent complexity. I really need to read Gödel, Escher, Bach. Showed an exhibit of a piano board that plays itself based on the silhouettes of birds on telegraph lines. Showed Twitchr, a map-based ‘open score’ using recorded birdsong.

Marek Kohn: images of cities underwater are unrealistic and risk encouraging fatalism. But climate change is about more than just the weather: it’s about social change, both within Britain and between countries. Britain will warm, but less than almost anywhere else in the world. British weather will become the envy of the world, and people will flock. Terraces will be favoured over detached houses. Life will become more communal and social, relying on shared resources. Notably, Britain will gain economically relative to continental Europe because Europe will heat up much more significantly. Perhaps the continent will be a test bed for new forms of communal, convivial living. Britain’s fortunes will depend entirely on immigration from other countries. The divisiveness of climate change may cause conflict, both within Britain and between European countries. We need to evolve a more nuanced from of freedom, not in individual consumption but in collaborative political decision-making.

Ian Goldin: this is a great and very previous moment in history – during the twenty minute talk, life expectancy of the audience has increased by five minutes – but it risks being an exception rather than a trend. The source of progress, connectivity and immigration, is at risk of being rejected and its benefits lost. The unwieldy institutions of the 1950s are no longer fit for purpose. At the centre, the tension between individual and collective freedoms and tragedy of the commons. Accepting a loss of individual and national sovereignty and freedom will be required. Climate change, antibiotic resistance are all examples of this. Increasing population density will mean pandemics are a serious risk. The financial crisis may have been the first of a number of 21st-century crises. So what does the future hold, and what can we do about it?

Ben Hammersley: began the talk by getting us all to stand up, stretch, say hi to our neighbours (such a good idea). IARPA is an intelligence technology agency, and advertises its requests for technology proposals at iarpa.gov. Its recent METAPHOR programme looked for talented linguists to help interpret metaphors and analogies in tapped materials. Looked at analogies and metaphor in architecture, operating systems, the floppy disk icon meaning save. “To those of you in the room with the last remaining BlackBerrys in the world…” Shifting analogies and metaphors is, in a way, the definition of innovation. Ben shared two works in progress: one on judging counter-terror measures in the same way we judge new drugs, setting off the greater good for the various negatives these measures involve; the other, on countries. Since 1492, only one European country (Portugal) has survived in an identical shape. What if we redrew the map based on culture, social connection, trade, intellectual cooperation? Think about where you live, and where your allegiances lie – with similar people, not clumps of soil. Examine metaphors and try as work out what’s behind that symbolism and whether it’s still valid. The compere notes the weird etymology of country names, including Welsh being the German word for ‘foreigner’.

Alex Fleetwood: “Where are the monoliths built to our artists?” Imagines a future game space in cities, with salaried employees choosing games for players based on their expertise and experience. Such spaces will be supported by governments, and will focus on archiving old games and hardware. Argues that such cultural institutions have a great impact on what art is made. Games are rarely made for their own sake – usually in service of the prevailing culture’s values.

Alice Taylor (married to Cory Doctorow): from maker movement to commercial product. MakieLab allows users to design an avatar to make a co-created doll. Manufacturing can happen wherever there are 3D printers. Each toy is unique. The toys have passed safety/CE certification. Boy and girl dolls have knees and elbows (so they can ride motorbikes!). 3D printing has totally changed the way toys can be made and personalised. Similarly, toy shops traditionally get toy companies to bid for shelf space – selling online has changed this. Also allows for agile, iterative development – impossible in mass manufacturing. A/B test and experiment as you go. Makies are now available in Selfridges – a podium let’s customers design dolls on tablets. Challenges include getting to a £20 price point, building up the brand, building games around Makies.

Beating PRISM with Hemlis

Via TNW:

Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, has launched a crowdsourced funding program to release Heml.is, a messaging service that seeks to evade government monitoring programs by using end-to-end encryption[.]

It’ll be free and and open-source when it comes out, with paid add-ons for extra functionality. And before anyone says it’s form over function: it needs to be beautiful if there’s going to be significant uptake, which is exactly what encrypted communications needs.

I’ve donated.