Programming

Teaching kids to program is not an easy task – their attention span is short and what they are able to accomplish in a brief period of time is often uninspiring which results in them losing attention quickly. Robots help a lot with this! The Orbotix team has turned their Sphero into a fantastic programming aid to introduce coding to kids as young as 4th grade. In about an hour kids will be commanding their robot to drive geometric patterns while also learning a bit about angles, degrees, time and distance calculations, loops and conditional branching. If your my age, you might remember Logo and turtle graphics . It turns out to be really cool to toss a robot into the mix, instead of just a computer screen. ...

I spent this weekend at LindzonPalooza . Once a year Howard Lindzon gets together a bunch of his friends at the intersection of financing, tech, media, and entrepreneurship, we descend on The Del in Coronada, and have an awesome 48 hours together. Many interesting and stimulating things were said, but one I remember was from Peter Pham over dinner. It was a simple line, “why do we teach languages in junior high and high school but not a computer language?” that had profound meaning to me. ...

Six weeks ago I saw a tweet about a new thing from Codecademy called Code Year. It promised to teach you how to code in 2012. I signed up right away and am now one of 396,103 people who have signed up as of this moment. Like a good MIT graduate, I’ve procrastinated. When I was an undergrad, I liked to say things like “I want to give all of my fellow students a four to six week handicap.” Yeah – I was the dude that blew off too many classes at the beginning of the semester. I did read everything so I eventually caught up pretty quickly, but fortunately MIT drop date was late in the semester so I had plenty of option value on bailing if I’d left things too long. ...

As I embarked on my journey to learn python , I began by exploring a number of different approaches. I finally settled on using “beginner’s mind” (shoshin to those of you out there that know anything about Zen Buddhism). Rather than just dive in and build on my existing programming skills and experience, I decided to start completely from scratch. Fortunately, MIT’s Introductory Computer Science class (6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming ) is available in its entirety – including all 24 lectures – on MIT’s OpenCourseWare . ...

January’s Tech Theme of the Month is going to be Python . I realize it’s still December; I decided to get a head start. Last month’s tech theme was videoconferencing . I learned a lot, including the unfortunate continued split between low end and high end and general lack of ability to have a single universal solution. Oh – and bandwidth still matters a lot. I expect by the end of January we’ll have much better videoconferencing infrastructure set up at Foundry Group with the single goal of eliminating some travel. ...

As a user, how often have you thought “I wish this web service was faster.” As a CEO, how often have you said “just make it faster.” Or, more simply, “why is this damn thing so slow?” This is a not a new question. I’ve been thinking about this since I first started writing code (APL) when I was 12 (ahem – 33 years ago) on a computer in the basement of a Frito-Lay data center in Dallas. ...

More from our friends Nate and Natty at Everlater – this time on debugging. One of the most important techniques we used when learning how to code is debugging. It allowed us to do two things: fix our own code when it was broken and parse through others’ code to better understand how they were doing things. From a backend perspective, debugging is essential. When I first started writing code, I would write what I *thought* was the correct way to do it. Ninty-nine times out of a hundred I was wrong and the code would blow up with some ugly exception that I had no clue about. Copying and pasting the exception into google got me decent mileage, but the real silver bullet I discovered was just start from the beginning of the method and step through it using the ruby debugger and figure out where I had gone wrong. Almost always I had forgotten to assign some variable or I was calling a method that did something different than I thought. ...

I know it’s been a few weeks since my last Nate and Natty / Everlater post on learning to program. I’ve gotten a few notes asking for more – expect a couple of posts over the next few days. In the mean time, here’s Nate’s view on how to divide tasks between partners – in this case him and Natty. Having good systems in place around your coding is just as important as the coding itself. Natty and I spent a huge chunk of our time figuring out a great workflow that would allow us to program more effectively, and we think it’s paid huge dividends over the lifespan of Everlater. ...

As Fred Wilson likes to say, often the best content for blogs is in the comments . In this case, it was in an email I got from Boaz Fletcher in response to my post Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers . Boaz made a very interesting observation: “As for learning how to code, I think good storytellers make the best programmers. I used to freak prospective employees out by having them write a story for me instead of the “what’s wrong with this code?” tests. But it showed me who was able to think well, organized, creatively, and filled in the details.” ...

Thanks for all the feedback and comments on the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater. In the last post, titled Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers , I foreshadowed some of the tools that Nate and Natty chose to build Everlater. Now that you know how they got started, here’s what they ended up choosing. Everlater is built on Ruby on Rails , postgreSQL and is hosted on Engine Yard using a passenger/nginx combination. Nate and Natty use several standard Ruby/Rails packages (gems) to extend the base functionality of Rails. On the front end, they use a combination of jQuery and Prototype for Javascript . ...