Everyone a Hacker

TheHackerCIO has been too busy, so he missed out announcing this on Monday.

This week is Computer Science Education Week. As part of it, everyone -- are you listening, recruiters, marketers, and business development specialists? --  is encouraged to spend an hour learning to code.   Details about the Computer Science Education Week are here.

And the actual video lesson for the "Hour of Code" is here, courtesy of Khan Academy.

And with Everyone a Hacker,

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO

The First 2 Iron Laws of Hacking

Everyone has to code in TheHackerCIO's household.  So my teenage daughter has embarked on studying Python. It's kind of a "shop" class for her.

And there are two iron laws I need her to know immediately. Unfortunately, TheHackerCIO will be like Cassandra -- the daughter of Priam rather than the NoSQL database. That is, he is doomed in advance that he won't be believed, although he will speak the absolute truth.

But that's generally the way between parents and children.

The first iron law is: "You didn't backup enough." Back up early; back up often; back up redundantly. If you just backed-up your code, then back it up again. Unfortunately, the only way to really learn this is through sad experience. After losing a complete day's work you will start to see the importance of this. I'm sure all my coding readers will remember their own backup moments. I love my Macbook Pro Retina for it's separate "time-machine" disk. When I mess up, I just go back in time and pull out what I erroneously deleted or otherwise ruined. I never code without it plugged in.

The other iron law of hacking, is "Always Hack Code." If you have left off writing code, then you have left the world of tech relevance. Practice, practice, practice. Practice makes perfect. All those other cliches. As another blogger says, use ABC: "always be coding." Or as github puts it: "Push code every day." They even have a tracker on their Repo, so you can see how well you've met that standard.

If my daughter can get these down early, she'll be ahead of the game.

I remain,

TheHackerCIO

No One Get's Out Of Here Without Hacking!

No child of mine will leave my house without having learned the gentle art of Hacking! Started just this week with my 15 year old daughter. I got her a copy of the Head First Programming. By the way, this series cannot possibly be over-hyped. It is far and away the best series of technical books there is, and I buy anything they produce, because the read is fun! I even got Head First Algebra and Statistics!

The book is a gentle intro to Python for newbies. I'm far from being a Pythonista, as everyone here already knows. TheHackerCIO hacks Java. And a little Clojure. But Python seems cool. Might be even better than Java. I find my heart strangely warmed by philosophies such as "One right way to do anything." I'm a little unsure about the meaningful whitespace, but I definitely want to learn a bit more Python.

And what better way than to do so with your loved-ones? That way you can share the Joy of Hacking with the whole Family. Coding is a life-skill. You can construct cool programs for the rest of your life to make your life better and further your values.

So, chapter 1 it is. I'm sure further reports may hit my blogosphere! The Family that Hacks together, Stays together. Strengthen Your own family: get them hacking!

I Am

TheHackerCIO