Red Squirrel's Nuts

Jumping with Joy at the Challenge of something New

Dev Bootcamp has a 60-day remote preparatory period that includes an assessment at the halfway mark. We use this assessment to gauge whether students are ready to start. Today I read a conversation between a student schedule to start May 13 and my co-founder Jesse Farmer. It’s a great example of why I’m thrilled to be a part of this venture.

Student: Hey there, I didn’t see anything covering Javascript in the prep-work, so I didn’t realize we were responsible for learning Javascript ahead of time. Is this in fact true, or are we being tested on our resourcefulness and / or ability to work independently? Either one is fine, just want to know what expectations I’m being held to, so I can prepare adequately. Thanks!

Jesse: That was deliberate. :)

Dev Bootcamp isn’t run like a traditional school where you’re given a set of topics to learn and then given a test which covers precisely those topics and no others. We couldn’t do what we do if we ran it that way because a huge part of a programmer’s job is approaching problems they’ve never seen before.

Here’s Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple, describing his work at Apple: “All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life.”

WTF are we assessing then, you might ask? We want to see how folks will respond. Will they jump with joy at the challenge of something new? Will they take their best shot, not worrying whether their answer was “the best” or “correct” or “optimal?” Will they get frustrated? Will they ask friends who know JavaScript for help?

We don’t grade the assessment like a test. It’s not like each question is worth 10 points and if you don’t answer it, well, that’s -10 points. Our goal is to get a clear picture of how our students think and how they grapple with problems. When something alarms us it’s rarely because a student got it wrong, it’s because a student is thinking about the problem in a confused or unproductive way.

Hope that helps!

Latent Human Potential pisses me off

I couldn’t possibly write down all the lessons I learned in 2012, but as the new year starts, there a three that stand out in my mind.

First, watching Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk for the nth time helped me understand something about the goal I discovered for my life a couple years ago. Simon talks about getting to the “Why” of what we do.

On this, my nth viewing of Simon’s talk, it occurred to me that my life goal was a “How”, rather than a “Why”. So I asked myself, why do I want to decentralize education? Why? Oh, it’s obvious! To Unleash Latent Human Potential! Being able to write down this core value has been priceless for expediting my decision-making in 2012.

Second, I found myself letting my ego get far too wrapped up in this goal. As if it was actually my goal that I alone was responsible for. I made a series of seemingly unrelated yet escalating mistakes toward the end of the year that forced me to take a hard look at myself. It didn’t take long to realize that I had let my desire to unleash latent human potential to occupy too big of a space in my identity and my life. I had become possessive of it, and felt ownership over it. I shifted this unhelpful thinking by re-establishing myself as just another servant of this mission. If I fail, the mission will go on, served by the thousands of other people working toward the same end. If I can contribute something to this goal, I will be thankful. It’s hard to describe this inner conflict, but suffice to say, framing myself as a servant of this mission has been incredibly helpful.

Finally, I learned the power of going all-in. I would not have learned this without watching Shereef Bishay, his staff, and his students at Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco. When I left Groupon in August, I thought it would be a good idea to spread myself around to a lot of different startups on a part-time basis. It was an interesting, brief, but ultimately unsatisfactory season of my life. I learned about the non-linear progression of one’s focus, and the power of the tipping point that happens when you’ve allowed yourself to “go all-in” on one venture.

Since “latent human potential pisses me off” it was relatively easy for me to pare down my spread-too-thin workload to the single startup that I felt gave me the best chance of unleashing the most latent human potential: Dev Bootcamp. It’s hard for me to describe what I mean by “all-in”. In the context of the student’s bootcamp experience, I’ll just say that the difference between 10 hours, 20 hours, 40 hours, and 80 hours is not 10, 20, and 40. At some point between 40 and 80, something multiplicative happens, and the experience becomes fundamentally different. The necessity of on-site therapists and integrated yoga sessions are some of the visible side effects of this “all-in” phenomenon at Dev Bootcamp.

2013 should be a very different year than 2012 for me. I couldn’t be more all-in on Dev Bootcamp Chicago. I don’t think I’ve ever been this all-in on a business venture. It’s a scary and thrilling place to find myself.

Of Feet, Doors, and Dev Bootcamp

[Update: We’ve just announced on TechCrunch that we’re opening Dev Bootcamp in Chicago in the Spring.]

In April of 2000, I was a family therapist in DuPage County, Illinois, with no formal technical training. I had recently taught myself HTML and had become proficient at “programming” with it. As I worked with HTML, I noticed that the work energized me. At the same time, I had tried and failed to teach myself Java. Despite that failure, I was convinced that I would enjoy and excel at developing software. So I decided to join a tech company, an early ed-tech startup called Edventions, based in Skokie, Illinois. It was eventually killed off by the dot-bomb explosion, but before its eventual demise, this startup, and specifically Irv Shapiro, allowed me put my foot in the door that opened to my career in software development.

Six month later, I was presented with an opportunity to shift my focus more fully into programming. I needed to learn Perl in order to keep my job. With a mortgage, a baby daughter, and a pregnant wife, my motivation to learn Perl was not insignificant. So I learned Perl, despite my previous failure with Java. I learned Perl extremely quickly, impressing Joel Grossman and Steve Bunes in the process. Steve put in a good word for me at the American Medical Association which, when Edventions collapsed, helped me land my second tech job. That second job was arguably an even riskier proposition than my first, just 6 months after I had started programming professionally. I spent 3 years at the AMA, and eventually got my big break at ThoughtWorks, which kicked off the series of fortunate events that has been the last 8 years of my career.

All of this was made possible by that foot in the door, and facilitated by a more immersive learning environment at Edventions. A big reason I failed to learn Java was because I was learning in isolation. I would read Java for Dummies between clients during the day, and then type in the magical incantations on my PC at night. I learned Perl in the presence of many experienced Perl programmers, a few of whom went out of their way to give me a hand up. The stark contrast between these two approaches to learning left an indelible mark on me.

My 4-year road from Edventions to Thoughtworks was incredibly frustrating and I wanted to short-circuit it for other aspiring software developers. So I shared what worked for me, and a couple years later, I led the formation of an apprenticeship program. The program took people who were within striking distance of our entry-level requirements, and surrounded them with dedicated mentoring, and a feedback-rich learning structure. (A more detailed description.) It does not prescribe curriculum, relying instead on competent mentoring and immersive project work. Obtiva’s apprenticeship program reflected my “upbringing” at Edventions and was born out of my belief that there were many other people like me out there who had no formal technical training, but great potential. I believed we could identify those people and expedite their foot in the door experience. By 2010, the program was on autopilot, and I had started shifting my focus further upstream, closer to pure beginners.

In 2012, I met Shereef Bishay in San Francisco. He had just started Dev Bootcamp. We kept in touch. I kept visiting. I spent time with their students. I looked at their job placement numbers. Shereef, and his business partner Jesse Farmer, had created a culture and a process which expedited and formalized the foot in the door phenomenon. They did this by focusing their entire business on one thing: creating an environment where high-potential beginners can work unfathomably hard for 9 weeks, and leave with a job as a web developer. Over 90% of these beginners end up with jobs that pay them an average salary of over $85,000.

While those hiring and salary numbers are fun to share, there are more powerful forces at work here. I’ll write more about these forces in the future, but the one I want to reiterate is the force created by these diligent students as they walk through doors that were closed to them just a few months prior. I’ve discovered that opening doors is my life’s work, and that Dev Bootcamp is the most efficient door-opening process I’ve ever experienced.

Related: I chose to join Dev Bootcamp full-time this Fall and have been quite gruntled!

Making a move

After a lot of thinking and conversations over the last few months, I’ve decided to leave Groupon in order to pursue my goals to help decentralize our country’s systems of education. It’s a big decision to walk away from a network of people that I admire, have learned so much from, and have loved working with for the past 6 years (including my 5 years at Obtiva). It’s not a decision I take lightly, but I can’t not make this move right now. If you know me, you know that I relish in the realization of human potential, particularly through self-directed and decentralized learning. I’m now ready to make that my full-time focus.

My goal for the next year is to put myself in a position to start or join an audacious venture that is working toward a decentralized future for our education systems. In the meantime, I will be working on several different Chicago ventures in and around the intersection of technology and education.

• Mobile Makers Academy: A joint venture with Vokal Interactive to create an academy to help developers learn iOS development. Apply here. Let me know if you’re interested in getting involved.
• Code Academy Ruby Dojo: I will be leading a group of junior Ruby developers through a course that provides the practice and mentoring necessary to help them become employable as software developers. More details soon. Follow @rubydojo to stay tuned.
• Red Squirrel Technologies: A little entity that I will use to do freelance work. I will focus on software development, and more importantly, apprenticeship program facilitation.

I believe that apprenticeship is a viable and immediate solution to some of our economy’s most pressing problems. First, our huge number of un/under-employed young people. Second, 50% of our businesses can’t hire enough skilled workers. There are probably many solutions to bridging this gap, and the one that I can help with is apprenticeship. I want to see 1000 apprenticeship programs started inside of businesses across the country. I wrote some of my ideas and an overview of my approach in this paper. 1000 apprenticeship programs is a tall order, but thankfully there are many people working on this, and some of our leaders in Washington are about to hear about it!

Here’s a cool story:

I was invited to speak at an UnCollege event a couple weeks ago in San Francisco. On a whim, I asked a friend for a meeting with Mitch Kapor. Unbelievably, I was able to get 40 minutes with him just a few hours before I flew home. I simply wanted to share some stories with him, with no real agenda. The outcome of our brief meeting was an invitation for me to give a TED-ish talk about apprenticeship to Obama’s CTO, Todd Park, and about 40 other tech leaders at the White House on August 21st. My goal for the day is to push apprenticeship as far as it can go. My friend Dale and I have been talking about an apprenticeship institute for the past few months, and I want to explore that idea at the White House. I am eager to see what transpires there.

Stay tuned!

I need to thank a bunch of people for the last 6 years at Obtiva/Groupon, and all they have done to set me up for whatever is ahead of me. Kevin Taylor, for hiring me, giving me part of your company, and being such a solid leader at Obtiva. Tyler Jennings, for your dedication to making great software. Andy Maleh, for your dedication to quality, to learning, and doing things the best way possible. I need to thank our many succesful apprentices over the years starting with Brian Tatnall and Colin Harris, and more recently, Carl Thuringer and Jacob Richardson, and everyone in between. For the many amazing craftsmen like Ryan Briones and Corey Haines who are just 2 of the dozens of kindred spirits who have inspired and challenged me over the years. Gary Levitt, the CEO of Mad Mimi, who taught me about how to love customer service and product development, and then handed me part of his company. Finally, a huge thanks to Neal Sales-Griffin, Dale J. Stephens, and Shereef Bishay, who all unknowingly conspired together to inspire me to FILDI.

Speaking of FILDI…

Programming as a Foreign Language

In both high school and college, I took several French courses. But I’ve never been to France. I’ve never been immersed into a French-speaking context, and therefore, I never achieved fluency in French. Decades later, I can still pick out French words, I can still understand phrases and sentences, and express a few ideas, but for the most part, my knowledge of the French language faded very quickly, and almost entirely when I stopped studying.

A few years after college, I started learning another language. This language was for computers, and it’s called Java. I read Java for Dummies, which I found at Barnes and Noble. I got to the point where I could make the compiler happy, and I could make widgets appear on the screen. But due to the purely independent nature of my studying, I was never immersed in the Java-speaking context. I never got over the hump and achieved fluency.

A year later, I started learning another programming language. It’s called Perl. I was working at “dot-com” startup as a HTML and content editor, and was handed The Camel Book by the company’s CEO when he effectivey told me to learn Perl or lose my job. I got to the point where I could print stuff onto the screen and execute programs. And then the CEO and CTO gave me fake CGI projects to work on in my spare time. When I quickly cranked those scripts out, they started giving me bugs to fix in the main product. I had no clue what to do next, so I asked the CTO for help. The CTO gave me a quick lesson on debugging, but I was still at a loss for how to fix bugs in our product code.

I had learned French and Java, but I’d never been immersed in them. I had now learned Perl, and the opportunity to immerse myself into a Perl-speaking context was available to me. I asked if I could move my desk to where the programmers worked. The people I’d been sitting near were talkative, energetic, and the space was bright. The developers kept their workspace dark, and they were intimidating to me. But I couldn’t think of any other way forward than to immerse myself into their land of Perl.

A few months later, I was fixing bugs. A few months after that, I was at another company writing more complex scripts. All along the way I was surrounded by people who were fluent in Perl. A year later, I was fluent in Perl. Two years later I was fluent in Java and Ruby.

Just as with spoken languages, achieving fluency in a programming language requires immersion. Once fluency is achieved, similar languages become much more accessible. Learning a new language in a non-immersive environment will give you concepts, syntax, rules, and trivia, but you will not achieve fluency, which in programming languages gives you the power to craft original solutions to arbitrary problems.

Non-immsersive learning is great, but it’s only a stepping stone to fluency. Codecademy and Treehouse are great examples of non-immersive learning environments for JavaScript. Code Academy and Dev Bootcamp are great examples of immersive environments that lead people to fluency in Rails. That said, both of these immersive programs are too short a time to achieve fluency for people who are completely new to programming.

Remarkably, though, I’ve seen graduates of both programs creating immersive environments for themselves in Chicago. I’ve seen small groups of Code Academy students join up to continue coding together on a regular/continual basis. I’ve seen people literally eat/breathe Ruby on Tuesdays, when you can participate in Code & Coffee (at Starbucks, free wifi) from 7am-9am, then Geekfest (free lunch, open to public) from 12pm-1pm, then Chicago Ruby (free dinner, open to public) in the evening. I’ve seen people diligently stay immersed over the course of months and then transition into various apprenticeship programs around the city, which eventually lead to full-time employment opportunities.

A great example of this transition is Jean Bahnik. Jean is a marketing executive turned Trunk Club apprentice, who also happens to be fluent in French.