Hack.summit() happened last week from 1st to 4th December. You may be wondering hack.summit() ,as the nerdy suggests it is a conference for programmers. No, I didn't travel to another conference, this one was done the programmer's way, virtually. The first of its kind, and quite a success I must point. Normal conferences require a lot of effort and expenses to organise but this simply required internet access therefore it was easier for everyone to participate. I was among the 50,000 attendees who grabbed this opportunity and listened to some speakers that caught my interest. Here is a little summary.
The Organisers:
The chief organiser of this summit was Ed Roman who is the co-founder of hackhands, a company that provides programmers with real time help online, which brought him to start hack.summit(), as might you guess, to help programmers be more productive as well help non profits orgnisations such as Black Girls Code and code.org through donations. The productivity gap between the good programmers and the bad ones is way too huge. Great idea it is. There were more than 20 speakers , big names in the programming world , some wrote programming languages, others created the Google Glass, each one of them is worth your time. Ed Roman shared some productivity tips and books( adding to my to read list), mostly common sense which is usually lost once you start coding.
Scott hanselman:
You don't exactly think free when you think Microsoft; a Microsoft engineer surprised with how much Microsoft is contributing to open source through azure.net and other free products like asp.net.
I quote , "I will make Microsoft free until they fire me". The motive being to give as much choices to developers as possible. His presentation also included the amazingness of Visual Studio as well as tips on productivity emphasizing using the appropriate technology for the right job.
Floyd Marinescu:
Floyd is the CEO of InfoQ: an online news website for developers as well QCon: a conference for developers as well. He talked about culture and happiness considering that he runs his teams virtually. A lot of teams run virtually including ibm and wordpress proving that virtual teams do work if there is the right culture in the team, which can be consciously built. They suceed by metrics, daily stand ups, dashboards, yammer social network , weekly video meetings and an annual face to face summit. He gave examples of core values that are crucial and should be emphasized, these include transparency, service, accountability and delegation of responsibilities rather than tasks. He also gave advice for tech enterprenuers starting out to learn the business side and not to avoid failure.
John Skeet:
John Skeet is an interesting character. He is the number one answerer on stack overflow. All programmers owe him, a lot, precisely he has answered over 30,500 questions on stackoverflow.He has written a book on C#, can recite all digits of pi backwards and his code doesn't need git revisions. Its no surprise that he is an engineer at Google. He gave his presentation with a sock puppet which made it even more interesting. He identifies the root causes of errors is having 10 fingers. Hard to believe but its sort of true, having 10 fingers forced us to use the decimal numbering system, while the computer still understands binary. Its the cause of misunderstanding between users, developers and architects. Users don't consider the needs of others, developers need to understand both architects and users, and architects face the decimal - binary challenge. He gave a lot of examples where this comes to play including formatting errors, discrete v continuous numbers, different date and time systems and to a small extent , relativity (Yes, Einstein's theory of relativity affects you). His advice included to keep it simple and only use stack overflow when necessary( He doesn't answer documentation questions on stack overflow).
Tom Chi:
The summit also included Tom Chi, the creator of Google Glass. He joined the GoogleX team from Yahoo and this is the team behind Google Self driving car, project loon, Contact lenses for sugar detection along side the Google Glass, accomplished in 2 years (speaking of innovation). Tom gave useful hints for successful innovation, tips he gathered from the making of the Google Glass. He pointed out how important it is to differentiate between guess and direct experience, how I got a couple of innovation goes from research to development and how to master these processes well. He also talked about how making something 10% better everyday results into miracles in the long run. We got some questions answered like why it was created, the future of Google Glass which is augmented reality and so much more and if the Google Glasses are really harmful to the eyes. He assured us even though he wasn't wearing his at the moment, there are not harmful as thought to be.
Janet Weiner:
Janet Weiner is a facebook engineer who has had 10 patents, she specialises in Big Data, specifically how facebook is being used to generate elections data. They use Chorus (a program) to quantify statuses and give clear statistics of people's inclination towards elections. It makes a lot of sense considering Facebook has become a source of everything. She attributes its success to the facebook culture, there quote I would like to requote, "Move fast and build things", "Done is better than perfect, Release the iterate", "Orville Wright didn't have a pilot's license". In short find your passion and build things.
Hadi Partovi:
This past week (8th to 12 December) was Computer Science Education week. Children were encouraged to try the
hour of code. The man behind this is Hadi Partovi, the founder of
Code.org. I also participated in this campaign(new blogpost coming) as I agree with his mission, to raise of awareness of computer science to young folks, why? Well computer science opens opportunities irrespective of background. His story is rather inspiring, a story of an Iran immigrant to the US who made it to Harvard, Microsoft and tech startups, all through computer science. Why then is Computer Science not as compulsory as Math? The Hour of Code has had much success, last year it had a reach of about 50 million, this year it aims reach 100 million. It has clearly been successful considering all major companies including Apple, Microsoft and Google are endorsing it as well as
President Obama. The tutorials use javascript because it runs everywhere. He talked about unconscious bias, a rather sensitive and important issue in hiring as well as advised startup founders to let go of not only underperformers but also mediocre employees.
Scott chacon:
Speaking of open source, lets talk about the guy who founded Github, Scott Chacon. It was interesting to learn that Github started from a Ruby meeting and the first 'office' was a coffee shop and that it runs without managers. Scott talked about Open Source, its history, why companies endorse it and its future. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler which was then open sourced, others joined such as the linux kernel and open source became the norm with few exceptions. Companies like
Google , Facebook among others encourage open source because they use it, Github itself uses Git, some companies survive entirely by Open Source, they also use it to attract and find the best developers and also because open source products allow working across fields. He gave a few pointers to start contributing to open source,
here and starting with your favourite products. As much as open source is fun, don't forget to license it appropriately, only lawyers will benefit.
Jennifer Pahlka:
Government Innovation. Not exactly the right combination of words, most of us think our governments are not innovative enough,but they are. Jennifer Pahlka is the Founder and Executive Director of Code for America and is the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the government. Government plays a huge role in technology including generating weather data, honolulu.gov and so forth. She emphasized on how important user experience research is important for innovative technology as well as the downsides of the
waterfall method in design.
Hack.Summit() was filled with all sorts of high profile people in the programming world including Tim Oreilly(the fonder of OReilly media), Ryan Rubinski(founder of codeacademy) among others. It was definitely worth the time. Well, the title of this post is what you missed out on but you didn't miss much because you can still watch the videos at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Smi8vrRC0U&list=PLerTgBTG9TVxwl2VonZ--LGiu9ZBGbsQ8&spfreload=10
If you are thinking of achievable new years resolution
Hack pledge might be a good place to start at. Until next time, keep hacking.
