I do agree with this. However, I think most online tutorials and books are skewed towards being not intellectually stimulating. Very much, "This is a loop. This is how you print." Barf.
The Stanford 106a track for CS freshmen is excellent. The curriculum is more bite-size than doing a project from top to bottom, so they introduce elements slowly (arrays only come up 3/4 into the class for example). However they design problems that really poke your problem-solving brain and challenge you to solve it with the limited tools you've learned.
Here's the first assignment. A former TA says that problem (3) from this book is the most intellectually challenging of the whole course, and it's from before you've learned anything about any language: http://see.stanford.edu/materials/icspmcs106a/07-assignment-...
I think a (good) class teaches depth while a project gets you up and teaches breadth. If you do a web project, you'll learn about frameworks, hosting, using different libraries, etc but the actual code you write will be rudimentary. Both are important of course.
I also work in a non-tech role at a startup (I run support at Twilio) and am teaching myself to code. My sentiments are quite the same as James's; it's fun and rewarding but there's so much to learn before you even know what you don't know, before you know what to Google to get help. It's like being illiterate and you don't even know enough to look up words in a dictionary.
I do think that knowing how to program and how computers work is a new form of literacy. Teaching kids programming is certainly more useful and stimulating than, say, long-division. One day people will (hopefully) say, "Wow, can you believe that in the past, only a tiny percentage of people knew how to program?"
Until then, I show my programmer friends my learning-to-program blog (http://reneecoding.blogspot.com), and they say, "This is so cool! It reminds me of what I did when I was twelve."
It's like being illiterate and you don't even know enough to look up words in a dictionary.
One of my friends in college compared it to Japanese 101: you can't read a character like 鳥, you can't sound it out, you can't look it up in the dictionary, and you lack words to describe what it looks like to anyone who could rectify any of these problems for you.
There is a trick for Japanese for looking those up in a paper or online dictionary (outside the scope of this post). Relatedly, to learn that particular character, you just write it on a piece of paper until your fingers bleed, and put it in your journal of words with some sample sentences, combinations, etc.
The programming journal thing is a good way to learn programming. My suggestion: if you're learning Japanese, you want Japanese people to critique your characters. Find the guys you want to be like and ask them to critique your programs. (For example, the programmers you want to be like would probably say that your solution for isDivisible will function but it would be quicker and easier to use the XOR operator, and as soon as you know "XOR" you can Google how to use it in Java.)
I'm surprised that support at Twilio is a non-tech role. Considering it's heavily targeted at developers, I would imagine most queries being fairly technical, no?
Good for you though! As you say, there's a lot to learn :) (but the good news is that you don't need to know everything to make something)
The vast majority of questions are non-tech (telephony-related, account issues, and other FAQ type stuff). The next largest set of questions is technical and that's what we have the evangelists for who are all working developers. reneighbor is also more technical than she gives herself credit for :)
I disagree. I've heard Bill Gates speak and spoken with profs who worked with him; he is deeply informed on the health and edu issues he works on. If we can get smart, creative people tackling those, all the better. Some problems don't have a market solution.
Gates might be the exception, and I do admire his work on malaria. But I really do wonder if there isn't a bigger idea that he's cowering away from in his quest to simply give his fortune away.
The quest to give his fortune away and cowering from a bigger idea?
He is changing the way development works. He is better funded than almost anyone else with no obligation to any other stakeholders (namely governments and political entities that use aid as a political chip).
He gets the opportunity to, as a private individual, challenge the market failures of our time. Who else is going to fund research aimed at saving the world's poorest with little chance of ROI? He can basically act like China does with their foreign aid but without taking all their natural resources in exchange.
If you truly think there is some big idea he is cowering from, you may have the greatest imagination I know of.
It doesn't read like a quest to give his fortune away, it looks more like a quest to try and solve some of the most intractable problems of poverty that the world faces. His legacy is trying to make the world a better place for the people sitting at the very bottom who capitalism has forsaken.
I don't dispute that his work has helped many, many people. I also acknowledge that simply putting money toward some of those dire problems now will ease a great deal of suffering, which is wonderful.
But philanthropy is an old fashioned way to solve problems. I guess I have this hope that someone like Gates would see a solution that took a very unexpected path.
I like that it's about thinking how to give responsibly and effectively, pledging early in life so they can put their creativity to good use, as the article says. People who sign are trading ideas and logistical advice, it's like a book club for philanthropy.
We hear ya loud and clear! SMS outside the US is tough to get complete coverage of, since carriers vary so widely, but it's definitely one of our top requests.
Hi, I work at Twilio and wrote that FAQ. Clarification; Canadian customers can definitely get toll-free numbers that US and Canadian users can call. However, Canadian callers often will get misreported in caller ID, which is a deal-breaker for many use-cases. But these numbers are available and functioning for Canadian customers.
That's neat. I used to live in Ann Arbor, which is a quiet student town that gets very crowded on football weekends. It would be interesting to make up a game that makes users match unlabeled traffic graphs to the towns or neighborhoods where the graphs were generated.
The Stanford 106a track for CS freshmen is excellent. The curriculum is more bite-size than doing a project from top to bottom, so they introduce elements slowly (arrays only come up 3/4 into the class for example). However they design problems that really poke your problem-solving brain and challenge you to solve it with the limited tools you've learned.
Here's the first assignment. A former TA says that problem (3) from this book is the most intellectually challenging of the whole course, and it's from before you've learned anything about any language: http://see.stanford.edu/materials/icspmcs106a/07-assignment-...
I think a (good) class teaches depth while a project gets you up and teaches breadth. If you do a web project, you'll learn about frameworks, hosting, using different libraries, etc but the actual code you write will be rudimentary. Both are important of course.