Red Squirrel's Nuts

A History of Independence

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 09:51:42 -0500

I’ve been reading a difficult book. It’s called The People’s History of the United States. It’s difficult because it tells the story of America from the perspective of the oppressed. As a financially secure, white, heterosexual, cisgendered man, I come from an unbroken lineage of men, who with many other similar men, benefitted immensely from the oppression of millions of people. It’s not pleasant to study this, and yet, it is enlightening.

Today is July 4th. America’s Independence Day. I’m actually alone in Spain today, so I’m missing our town’s parade and fun festivities with my family. I’ve decided to write down some poignant excerpts from the book as a way for me to let the lessons of history sink in. And to ponder how much further we need to progress if we want every American to truly celebrate their independence.

Frederick Douglass, July 4th, 1852, full text

Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? …

What to the American Slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than any other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thankgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocricy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocricy, America reigns without rival.

Sojourner Truth, 1853

I know that it feels a kind o’ hissin’ and ticklin’ like to see a colored woman get up and tell you about things, and Women’s Rights. We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we’d ever get up again; but… we will come up again, and now I’m here…. we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like but it is comin’…. I am sittin’ among you to watch; and every once in a while I will come out and tell you what time of night it is….

Frederick Douglass, August 3rd, 1857, full text

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle…. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will….

Permission granted

Mon, 18 May 2015 18:22:32 -0500

Permission granted:

leongersing:

I don’t know what it is with my generation in America these days but I find myself acting like a broken record. Reminding folks of the same things over and over again. I decided to make it simple and share it with you now.

There is no one to gain permission from. There is no one to impress. There…

Responding to Jeff Casimir

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 08:59:00 -0500

Last week, Jeff Casimir pointed me at a blog post he had written about coding bootcamp intensity, and invited me to respond.

At the risk of sounding hypersensitive, I’m going to take a close look at his post and respond to both the explicit and the implicit messages he’s sending.

I like Jeff. He’s a good guy with a good school. I react strongly against some of the messages he’s sending and I still like Jeff. :)

Jeff started out with a disclaimer too. He said he respects Dev Bootcamp, Flatiron School, and MakerSquare. Cool, me too!

Then he chooses the word “notoriously” to describe the work ethic of DBC’s students: “Dev Bootcamp students notoriously spend super long hours in the building throughout their nine weeks.”

Huh? Are our students seriously notorious? I mean, I’m glad they’re well-known, but I do not appreciate our students’ work ethic being framed as if they’re doing something wrong. I’d prefer a critique of the pace of our program.

To be clear, our students spend super long hours for 9-15 weeks, depending on their learning speed. About 20% of our students take longer than 9 weeks to graduate, and it’s for a variety of reasons (got sick, new baby, got stuck on one concept, etc). We don’t charge them anything extra for their extra time with us. Our program’s flexibility is one of its key benefits.

Jeff goes on to ask us to “suppose that training the brain is like training a muscle” and then says that overuse could lead to injury. Your brain is indeed like a muscle in that you can strengthen it with deliberate practice. But it’s not like a muscle in that you’re not going to tear it, pull it, or strain it. Believe me, I did my best to strain it when I was teaching myself how to become a great software developer during the first five years of my career. What happened during those long hours and late nights was that I often feel asleep at the keyboard. I got tired, I caught up on sleep. That’s it. Our brains are extremely resilient.

Speaking about the DBC “all-in” approach, Jeff says, “Maybe you can get good value out of that approach for nine weeks, but it won’t work for 27.”

Maybe you can get good value? Maybe? Jeff, buddy, your agenda is showing! DBC has graduated over 750 people, they’ve been hired by well over 350 companies across the country (Turing School is one of those companies). And well over 100 companies have hired multiple DBC grads. In 2014, we have many family members and significant others of DBC alumni attending based on their loved ones’ recommendations. Read the latest report from Course Report and see for yourself. This model undeniably creates value. For God’s sake, people are writing songs about it!

I also need to clarify the 9 weeks vs. 27 weeks comparison: DBC’s immersive curriculum is a 9 week curriculum, but add our 9-week remote prep program (~20 hours/week), the possibility of stretching the immersion by 6 weeks, plus our 5-day post-graduation Career Week, and DBC provides students with up to 25 weeks of instruction for $12k. That’s incredible value.

Jeff is right when he says that we don’t value work/life balance for our students during their immersive experience. We tell our students to put their lives on hold so that they can learn their asses off for a few months. Many of them choose this approach because they want to minimize the amount of time they are unemployed. Others yearn for that immersive foreign language experience one can only get from visiting a foreign country. They want to only ever hear that strange new language until it finally starts making sense. Then after about a month, they begin speaking fluently. Putting their life on hold for 9-15 weeks is key to student success at DBC.

Jeff tells his students to “work crazy hard now so you never have to again.” I think this is really bad advice. It mirrors the mentality that many people bring with them out of CS undergraduate programs: “I’ve put in a ton of money, effort, and time, and now I’m ready to reap my rewards. It’s finally time to get paid and get pampered. Where’s the kegerator?!” And then they’re totally uninspired to learn anything else or improve their skills because learning hard is only for school.

I advise this: “Learn crazy hard now so that you learn how to learn crazy fast. Because you’re going to need to keep learning for the rest of your career.” Case-in-point: Our students consistently get non-Ruby jobs. Many of them land jobs doing Python, Node.js, Java, and even iOS. They’ve become world-class beginners (aka professional-grade learners), which means they can quickly transition to valuable team members regardless of the software platform the company is using.

Jeff goes on to say “At Turing we like to have more instructor-led sessions, lectures, and workshops because we have the classroom experience to pull them off.” If you look at the context, the implication is that DBC doesn’t have the experience to be as “instructor-led” as Turing. In reality, the DBC approach puts a ton of pressure on teachers to really know the craft of software development. Our students spend most of the day coding with each other while under our supervision and mentoring. Our teachers are accountable to guide the students toward the knowledge and wisdom they lack, regardless of whether it’s interpersonal, in the shell, in the database, in Ruby, in JavaScript, or in myriad frameworks, And the teachers don’t do this by simply coding up the answer, they help the student learn to find the answers themselves. This is improvisational teaching and our teachers are very good at it.

(Don’t even get me started on the workshops our teachers lead on empathy, sexism, oppression, the inner critic, effective feedback, and being authentic.)

I totally agree with Jeff on this point: “The important part is that there are constant expectations on student time and learning.”

But then he drops this little bomb: “If the staff is only there to answer questions, that’s not education.” He doesn’t attach this statement at any school in particular, so the implications are left to the reader. Ug.

I believe Turing School does great work. From what I can tell, Jeff is a good educator. I know some of his teaching team well since one was a 2013 DBC grad, and another was a former DBC mentor. They’re both amazing and Turing students are lucky to have them.

I think the world would be a better place if Jeff would write up a critique of DBC and/or the bootcamp model. It’s clear to me he thinks it has a lot of flaws, and I’d value an explicit critique a lot more than the subtle and indirect jabs in blog posts like this one.

A prospective student asked me

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 07:30:58 -0500

“What advice would you give to someone considering this industry to be (increasingly) successful in it?” My answer:

Follow your energy. If you find something interesting, dive deep into it.
Get extremely good at the first programming language you get paid to work in.
Develop a reputation for learning rather than a reputation of expertise.
As you move from team to team and/or job to job, try to be the worst developer on your team.

What Misogyny Is

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 05:52:22 -0500

What Misogyny Is:

sorayachemaly:

There is a lot of confusion about what misogyny is. It’s a system whereby women are subjugated and dehumanized. We are all part of this culture, so one of its notable and defining features is the degree to which women themselves internalize ideas about women’s inferiority and act in misogynistic…

DBC: this strange and beautiful place

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 09:56:45 -0500

DBC: this strange and beautiful place:

katherineimogene:

I earned these tags, and am very proud of my journey to this moment. I’ve taken a few days away to reflect - and sleep..a lot. I’m going to tell you about the worst week, and then I’m going to tell you how Dev Bootcamp has changed my life. Okay? Ok.

Here are some things about week eight of…

Dispelling Mythical Holacracy

Thu, 03 Apr 2014 22:14:00 -0500

Journalists and bloggers have sensationalized Holacracy in the past couple months with headlines like “How Zappos is getting rid of managers to retain a flat startup culture”. In the process, they’ve spread a lot of misinformation, and a lot of people now mistakenly believe that Holacracy is way to flatten a company into a non-hierarchical, leaderless, ambiguous collective.

A few quick examples…

“In November at the [Zappos] all hands meeting, [Tony Hsieh] announced that the 1,500-employee company would be restructuring into what is known as a ‘Holacracy’. That means a flat structure, with no job titles and no managers.” – Christina Farr, Venture Beat

“The absence of structure is a structure in and of itself. When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally held power (rich white men). That’s how you end up with stories like this coming out of GitHub.” – Catherine Bracy, Code for America

“Holacracy is about flatness. Think hierarchy and then think the opposite for holacracy.” – William Tincup, fistful of talent

Dev Bootcamp adopted Holacracy last October. We’ve been using it as our organization’s operating system for 6 months now. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned about Holacracy, starting with the aspects of Holacracy that clearly contradict the dominant narrative floating around about it.

Holacracy is inherently and explicitly hierarchical. There is a Board, whose leader (aka Lead Link) appoints the leader of the company. The company leader appoints all leaders of the next layer of leadership. Those leaders can appoint any leaders of sub-divisions (aka Circles) under them. We use software called Glassfrog to work with Holacracy. The default page in Glassfrog provides a nice visual representation of our hierarchy.

Holacracy has job titles (aka Role names). The most significant difference between typical job titles and Holacratic roles is that a job title typically corresponds to a 40 hour/week set of responsibilities, whereas Holacratic roles are typically much more fine-grained. For instance, one of my co-workers energizes 17 different roles, such as Event Staffer, Local Onboarding, and Office Manager. Since roles can be fluid, we did get rid of our former titles and replaced all of them with a simple and consistent “Partner” title. And yet, each of us tends to identify with one primary title. I used to call myself the Director of Chicago, and now I call myself the Lead Link of Chicago. Teachers still call themselves Teachers.

Holacracy’s power structure is explicit and clearly visible to the whole company. As I already showed you, Holacracy has a very explicit power structure. It’s a hierarchy, but Holacracy adds something special to it. For every divisinon head, aka Lead Link of a Circle, there’s a corresponding representative elected by the Circle. This person is the Rep Link, and this role’s purpose is to raise any unresolved tensions up the hierarchy to the parent Circle. This role provides a balancing effect against any domineering Lead Links. Rep Links operate in the parent Circle, just like Lead Links, with the same authority to propose, reject, and process governance.

Holacracy lets you refactor your organization. Software development has a term called refactoring. It means to improve the internal design of your code without changing its behavior. About 3 months into working with Holacracy, we started applying principles of Object-Oriented design to our organization, such as Don’t Repeat Yourself and Single Responsibility Principle. Unleashing our programmer brains on the structure of the company and the roles that we work in every day has resulted in far greater clarity of our roles, responsbilities, and authority (aka Domain).

Holacracy is autocratic. When a role has the authority (aka Domain) to make a decision, the person in the role doesn’t need to consult with anyone. They can simply, autocratically, make that decision. For instance, Lead Links have the domain to assign people to roles and our Chicago Office Manager role has sole authority over decisions about our office space. This is wonderfully freeing and efficient, because as the late, great Grace Hopper used to say, “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” Being autocratic requires a couple things: lots of trust, and tight feedback loops between the autocrat and the people affected by their decisions.

Holacracy feels biological. One of the core features of Holacracy is its tension processing protocols. These happen in periodic (usually weekly) Tactical meetings. I won’t go into the details of how these work, but when facilitated effectively, they can be amazingly effective at processing tensions. It’s helpful for me to think of tensions as food, and our Tactical meetings as our digestive system. The poop is the action items and projects that result from the Tactical meeting. And just to force the metaphor, those action items and projects act as fertilizer, growing us toward the company’s purpose. The work that creates this progress tends to create tension among the team, and the circle of life repeats!

I’ve described my unique experience with Holacracy. I’m not a Holacracy expert, but I’ve learned a lot about it as we’ve been running it at Dev Bootcamp every day over the past 6 months. I imagine Holacracy can look quite different at different companies, but it does have a single constitution, and so I’m confident that the attributes I’ve described above will be shared across all implementations of this innovative way to organize a company.

Sexism and Oppression: From Oblivion to Action

Wed, 05 Mar 2014 17:12:00 -0600

This post is going to be a stream of my consciousness about my gradually increasing awareness of the oppression that exists around me, specifically sexism. This is my personal blog and I’m using this post to remind my future self about where I stood on this day.

Almost every day of my life has been spent surrounded mostly by caucasian people who aren’t super worried about paying the rent/mortgage or putting food on the table. Being a boy, particularly a shy boy, I’ve spent a lot of my life surrounded by boys and men. There have been exceptions, like when I spent 4 years working as a therapist and earning my master’s degree in marriage and family therapy. Those years were spent mainly around women. Those years ended when, at the age of 26, I decided I wanted to become a software developer.

I grew up in the lily-white suburbs east of Seattle. In 1992, I chose to attend Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, a similarly caucasian suburb of Chicago. I’ve lived in that same suburb for 20 of the past 22 years. It is historically a very conservative, religious community.

I played American football in high school and college. It was a huge part of my life for those 8 years, and has had a lasting impact on my work ethic and goal-orientation. I loved that sport. It has been over 18 years since I played my last game in 1995, and I still miss playing football. Football is (almost) exclusively for men.

When I switched from “family therapist” to “programmer” in 2000, I moved from a field of mostly female practitioners to a field of mostly male practitioners. I noticed this gender-ratio difference, but I didn’t think much of it. I just knew that I loved solving problems with programming languages and I wanted to get better at it. And I got a lot better at it. I took all of the work ethic, obsessiveness, and tenacity that made me a successful (small-time) football player and threw it into becoming the best software developer I could be.

In 1997, a few years before I made this career switch, I married Staci, a feisty, charming, athletic woman who I met when I was 21. Both of us were just 23 years old when we married. My daughter Rose was born in 1999, when we were 24.

My self-induced immersion into the world of software development started a pattern of neglect between me and Staci. I would frequently pull all-nighters and while I still “showed up” as a father and husband, I was often a zombified version of myself, operating at about 25% of my capacity, most easily evidenced by the consistent loss of my short-term memory.

Our family was growing. My sons Ricky and Charlie were born in 2001 and 2004. We needed more space to live in, and we were burdened by a ton of credit card and student debt. I kept working hard to get us out of financial stress. Up until 2001, Staci worked part-time. After our second child was born, Staci stayed home with the kids. Since the day we were married, she has been the primary caregiver for everyone in our home. I’ve tended to be a grown-up kid when it comes to caregiving.

In 2009, I was a partner at a software consultancy named Obtiva. The company was doing well and I was now being compensated at a level that the financial stress in my life was starting to decrease. This is when I finally looked up from the trenches of my obsessions and started becoming more aware of injustice and disparity. Up until that point, I felt like I was sprinting. It’s almost impossible to be aware of anything other than the finish line when you’re sprinting.

Since then, I feel like I’ve been running a marathon. I’m still moving along at a steady pace, but I notice a lot more around me. I’ve noticed lots of things over the past few years.

When I was helping lead Obtiva, we were incredibly male-dominated. Since I had been there since (almost) the beginning, this realization crept up on me and it wasn’t something I had many feelings about. I tried to recruit female apprentices, but also noticed that they struggled more than the male apprentices. It wasn’t until we were acquired by Groupon and I looked around at the Chicago engineering team (circa 2011) that I was blown away that while we had over 100 engineers, I could count the women on one hand. I knew all the people hiring people, and I realized there was something systemic at work, something beyond anyone’s direct control. I knew for a fact that the hiring people weren’t a bunch of dudes consciously trying to keep women out.

I met an interesting guy named Paul Baker around 2009. On the surface, he looked like any other white guy in tech. He was the CEO of his own web design firm, but Paul had a very strong sense of justice. He kept reaching out to me with ideas we could work on together that would help disadvantaged people. Despite my passivity, he was relentless about this, and through the ideas and connections he kept throwing at me, I stopped running so hard and started conversing with people about injustice and what’s broken in our society.

Around the same time, I completely stopped running and stood still for a while. I had reached a very dark place in my personal life and I had to take some time to consider where I was headed. That’s when I discovered one of my life goals: to decentralize education. A few years later I asked myself Why? Why do I want to decentralize education? The answer came immediately: to unleash latent human potential! A year ago, I stopped and thought about the demographics of humanity’s latent human potential, and it doesn’t take a statistician to tell you that when it comes to developing software, there is an incredible amount of latent human potential in women and underserved minorities.

As I launched Dev Bootcamp in Chicago, I was very deliberate in recruiting women onto our team. I had previously failed to create an apprenticeship program that worked for women, so I figured that if we had strong female practitioners involved, that they could help create a great environment for women to learn in. As the applications poured in for our program, they were overwhelmingly male. We soon had 60 students in our space and I was sprinting again. Issues around justice and diversity blurred by as we tried to get our program off the ground and give our students a great experience.

A year later, the program is now cruising along successfully. We’re still improving and adapting, but we’re no longer sprinting. We have more time to stop and think about how to engage the tremendous latent potential that exists in the segments of our population that are currently not actively participating in technology. We’re working closely with Girl Develop It, Levo, Close the Divide, and more recently, YesWeCode.

One new aspect of our program this year is a workshop on oppression and sexism. I’ve run this workshop twice now, and it has had a powerful impact on me. There are a series of exercises that I take our students through that have helped me recognize the enormous privilege that I’ve lived with since the day I was born. The workshop gives me brief glimpses of what it’s like to be oppressed, which has actually left me feeling nauseous by the end of our time together.

The most concrete takeaway from this workshop is this: institutional oppression is rampant in our society, and what keeps that oppression going isn’t some malignant rich white dude pulling levers in an ivory tower somewhere. What keeps institutional oppression going is passivity and obliviousness. Ignoring oppression is an act of supporting oppression. I am increasingly facing oppression. I am still very ignorant. I am stumbling around, clumsily trying to be an active participant in unleashing the latent human potential that surrounds us in every city in this country.

Experiences with sexism

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 10:16:47 -0600

Experiences with sexism:

mariabpiper:

Two days ago, I attended the Engineering Empathy session about Sexism, and during the session, it became apparent that many of the men in the room doubted whether sexism existed or whether it was a widespread problem.

Although not all women face or admit to being affected by sexism, I have…

The Last Thing We Need

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 08:21:36 -0600

The Last Thing We Need:

leongersing:

From the moment of our birth we are told the difference between right and wrong, good and evil and are given measuring sticks for success. The need to accurately predict patterns of behavior have led to the proliferation of the species. But when do we stop? When do we know that the wisdom that led…

An Old-School Solution for Today's Skills Gap

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 13:55:55 -0600

apprentice-us:

My blog post about apprenticeship over at Wired’s Innovation Insights:
http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/old-school-solution-skills-gap

3 Phases of Beginner Software Developers

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 18:46:54 -0600

One of my biggest takeaways from launching Dev Bootcamp in Chicago in 2013 was the realization that Dev Bootcamp exists to efficiently transition people from paying to learn to paid to learn. There are few things more life-changing than that transition. I remember how profoundly it changed my life when I started getting paid to learn to be a programmer when I was 26.

Using what I learned this year about the “transition from paying to paid”, I came up with the following 3 phases that many successful beginner software developers are transitioning through in today’s software development education ecosystem.

Dabbler phase

The learner has enough context to begin to see the things they need to learn. They know the tools necessary to run programs, though they may not truly know how to use them yet. They can speak “tech” to a certain extent and are able to cobble together solutions to technical problems. They’ve completed online tutorials.

This phase is typically free or nearly free.

Examples include: Khan Academy, MOOCs, Codecademy, and Treehouse.

Immersive phase

This is an intense period of learning where the learner gains initial fluency through immersion in the software development ecosystem. When I think about this phase, I imagine my sister dabbling with French for years, but not gaining fluency until she spent a summer in France. She didn’t come back and write epic French literature, but she could speak like a native.

In this phase, learners are typically paying or scholarshipped.

Examples include: Dev Bootcamp, Hackbright Academy, and Launch Academy.

Apprenticeship phase

These learners now have the context and fluency to allow them to enter the world of professional software development. This phase is characterized by working on the job with a real software team delivering software. Apprentices are one-on-one with a more experienced mentor, pair programming for most of their hours together.

In this phase, learners are typically paid.

Examples include: apprentice.io and 8th Light’s apprenticeship program.

Some Thoughts

Not all of the current offerings on the market fit neatly into these phases. For instance, bloc.io costs money, but is not immersive in the same way that Dev Bootcamp is immersive, since bloc.io is a remote mentoring experience while Dev Bootcamp students spend 40+ hours/week face-to-face with instructors and many additional hours face-to-face with each other. Another example is gSchool, which lasts 24 weeks and aims to get beginners through the apprenticeship phase before graduation. Finally, there are those people who can make the transition from “free to paid” without ever paying much of anything along the way. This was my journey, and I co-wrote a book to help others make that same journey.

Your Thoughts

Head over to Quora to weigh in on which programs fit in which phases…

Learning to Program: In which of Dave Hoover’s Dabbler / Immersive / Apprenticeship phases do each of the “learn to code” offerings fit?

Thanks to Dan Croak of Thoughtbot for some helpful edits of the 3 phases.

Precious Journey, Changing Gears

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 04:35:00 -0500

On the morning of April 22nd, a group of 6 co-workers welcomed 15 students into a large office space. One of these co-workers was the Director of the office. That Director was me, and I was scared. Together, those 15 students paid about $180,000 to be in this office with me and my co-workers. We had 9 weeks to launch their careers in software development. They expected jobs. It was on the news, so even my neighbors knew about it. My reputation was at stake.

We took them through a few exercises and talked at them for a few hours. The big goal was to get them “coding” before lunch. Through a combination of good timeboxing and my discomfort with listening to myself speak, they began working through their first coding challenges at 11am. I think this is where I started losing control.

The students worked in pairs. Our workstations are actually built for pair programming. Once those 15 students started collaborating, it was only a matter of time before they would take over.

Our teachers also work in pairs. Our program has 3 phases of 3 weeks each, and teachers pair-teach a phase with each other. So, once we have all 3 phases in session, we have 3 pairs of teachers. Because it takes 6 weeks to ramp up to 3 phases, it took longer for the teachers to take over.

I am inspired by people who choose a difficult or abnormal path. Admiral Grace Hopper is one of those people, and she liked to say that “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” That saying is written on the wall in our large office space. While they are in the space, the students and the teachers definitely live by these words.

Inside jokes started to happen. New challenges were assigned. Shoes started to come off. High fives began to break out. Students worked late into the night. Doubts began to creep in. Competitive edges started to sharpen. A generous spirit of helpfulness and collaboration emerged. Struggling students felt supported by stronger students.

Another group of students arrived. Two more teachers arrived. The helpfulness spilled over from the first cohort as they began to mentor the students behind them. These students, who were paying more than $1000 week to learn how to code, were taking the time to teach students who knew even less than they did. Their generosity brought me to tears when I first saw this “pairing board”:

With pair programming now happening across cohorts, the program was out of my control. The students were spending countless hours together, laughing, crying, hugging, fighting, forming deep relationships, and living together. But then something profound happened.

They began learning faster than we can teach. Being a self-taught software developer, I know how this moment changes your life.

We enjoy unleashing latent human potential. This means that we tend to encourage self-directed learning, even when it’s learning “dangerous” or ill-advised techniques. The fuel that drives their learning is enthusiasm, and that fuel is fed and protected at Dev Bootcamp.

The group of co-workers that do this work has grown beyond my control. As we ramped up to full capacity, the typical co-founder many-hat-removal process created jobs for 14 people from the work that just a few of us were doing originally. They are a remarkable team of people who feel safe to speak truth to power. It is an absolute privilege to work with Abi, Alex, Alyssa, Elliott, Jen, Jill, Jonathan, Kevin, Mike, Nate, Ryan, Tiffany, and Torey every day. They are learning, they are innovating, and they are the catalysts that create life-changing moments for our students.

I’m learning too. One of the biggest lessons of these first six months is learning to trust the collective wisdom of our students and staff. Time and time again, I find myself astonished and humbled at the diversity and brilliance that arise when I step back and let the collective self-organize. I’ve also learned that consensus is not the goal. I’ve learned there are times to delegate decisions, there are times to gather ideas, and there are times when clear decisions must be made by me. I’ve learned that constraints are powerful. I keep learning this. I’ve learned about essential stress and accidental stress.

Our phase assessments have taught me the most about constraints and stress. They’re painful for the students as well as the teachers. The essential/unavoidable aspect of our assessments is that they’re a judgment on someone’s progress. They could change your graduation date, and sometimes they even result in us asking you to leave the program. It’s a direct judgment of students, and an indirect judgment of teachers. There is no avoiding this stress if we want to graduate job-ready software developers. We try to be as supportive as possible so that the stress is manageable. As we find accidental stress in the process, we work to remove it.

As we begin to ramp down 2013, and I look at what we’ve accomplished, I am extremely proud. Our students are now working at Code for America, Pivotal Labs, ThoughtWorks, 8th Light, Clinkle, Treehouse, Braintree, BrightTag, Groupon, GiveForward, and dozens of other software development shops across the country. This is an amazing foundation for 2014.

While I am proud of what our students and staff have accomplished this year, there’s a growing dissillusionment among us. It creeps in at random moments when we step away from our keyboards and look around, and realize how unfathomably white and male we are as a school.

Don’t get me wrong, I think white guys are awesome. My dad is a white guy, and don’t even get me started on how great he his. I’m a white guy too, and so is my friend Yohanan. We think we’re pretty neat. Superman is a white guy. Lenny Pepperbottom is a white guy. My sons are both white guys, and wow, yeah, I’m a huge fan of them. And yet, if you stop and think about it, there is a lot more to life than white guys.

Latent human potential pisses me off. When I look at the demographics of Dev Bootcamp Chicago (currently 64% white male) and I look at the demographics of our country (approximately 31% white male), I can do some math and statistics in my head, and then I can’t not consider how many non-white-men there must be who would make astoundingly good software developers, and then I get pissed off that there is all this potential just sitting out there in a huge crowd of non-white-men.

I want 2014 to be a year that creates a statistically significant dent in the student demographics of Dev Bootcamp Chicago. This won’t happen through limiting the number of white guys. We won’t have quotas or caps or different standards or anything like that. Once a student applies to Dev Bootcamp, race, age, and gender are not something we consider. We accept people solely based on our belief that they will succeed in our environment.

This dent will happen through a strange and mysterious process called “marketing”. We have to spread the word to the non-white-guys of the world and let them know that software development is awesome: you can like your job, earn a good salary at the same time, and even work on projects that help people. Most non-white-guys in the world are women, so I’m planning to start with women.

Stay tuned.

I never saved anything for the swim back

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 19:47:52 -0500

I never saved anything for the swim back:

avik2013:

GATTACA most memorable phrase, to the end of scene looking at the stars. _______________ Vincent: You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton:…

I saw this movie on a date when I was 16. This scene burned itself in my mind, and since then when I’ve been tired, or wanted to save something of myself for later, such as an idea or some energy, I hear Vincent say, don’t save it. Give your all now. You won’t run out. And if you do, you’ll deal with it then.

DLG + DBc: Heads down

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 13:37:23 -0500

DLG + DBc: Heads down:

Words can’t express how much this post means to me.

dottedlinegirl-dbc:

It’s finals week of DBc— or final project week, anyway. We present on Friday, which, for my team at least, means we’ll be spending all of Thursday moving our code to production and debugging and putting on what final touches we can sneak in, which means we have one day left to identify and…

liz learns ruby: Conversations about wizardry, gender, and diversity

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:04:30 -0500

liz learns ruby: Conversations about wizardry, gender, and diversity:

feministy:

Earlier this week, I ran into a brick wall of sexism. What happened after that was infinitely more interesting than the event itself.

Fellow boot and member of the cohort below me, Eric spoke to me during our lunch hour:

What can I do to help make this cohort better?

Elliott, Dev…

The Support to Succeed

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:57:00 -0500

Incoming Dev Bootcamp student Wendy Sanchez-Vaynshteyn emailed me yesterday, concerned about whether she was truly ready to start Dev Bootcamp on June 24th. In her words:

“Hi Dave, I’ll get straight to the point: I’m scared that I have not learned what I should have learned by now to be ready for Dev Bootcamp.”

She went on to describe all the reasonable reasons as to why one might back out or defer Dev Bootcamp until later… such as distracting life events and perceiving that she was already “behind” some of her cohorts.

She found my response helpful, and said I could share it…

Wendy,

Based on the code you wrote in the 30-day assessment and follow-up refactorings, I think you’re ready. If you can spend the next few weeks preparing full-time, then you’re going to be good enough to get started. Yes, you might struggle in the first week. Many students struggle in the first week. You might even need to repeat Phase 1. (We’ve never had a cohort that didn’t have at least 2 students repeat a phase.) The key is this: I think you’re ready to start, and once you’re here, we’re going to give you the support to succeed, whether that success happens in 9 weeks, 12 weeks, or 15 weeks, we’ll get you there.

Every cohort has a spread of abilities based on previous experience. Every boot has to grapple with comparing themselves to other boots. Accepting your own pace and learning style is a big theme of Phase 1. I’m actually glad that you’re already cognizant of the differences in where people start, so it’s not a surprise to you.

Over time, through repeated phases and teamwork, the differences even out quite a bit. It’s awesome to watch.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if you’d like to connect with any of our other instructors or students before you get here.

Best,
–Dave

Jumping with Joy at the Challenge of something New

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:11:29 -0500

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!

Diana Kimball: A Day of Dev Bootcamp

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:19:19 -0600

Diana Kimball: A Day of Dev Bootcamp:

dianakimball:

I was supposed to spend yesterday in an airplane, hurtling from San Francisco back to Boston. Instead, I ended up in a fifteenth-floor conference room in Chicago with 30 aspiring web developers, getting them excited about coding.

What? How? Rewind:

It’s April 2011, and Jesse Farmer and I meet…

Latent Human Potential pisses me off

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:16:00 -0600

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.