Thoughts/Essay

Learning to Code is like Learning to Drive

Tue, May 22, 2012 - 8:59am -- Isaac Sukin

A lot of people think about programming as some huge, difficult discipline that you sit down and learn like you would learn History or Math. I think I'll learn how to code today, one might say, and I've really been looking forward to that quantum physics class.

Here's the thing: almost no one learns how to code in a classroom, by hearing about it or by reading about it. People learn how to code by doing it, like driving a car. But most people learn how to drive a car because it gets them from Point A to Point B, not because driving is fun. Lots of people drive for fun, but hundreds of millions of people slog through traffic on their way to work every day.

Big Screens Matter Too

Fri, May 11, 2012 - 1:05am -- Isaac Sukin

I have a problem with mobile-first design.

I spend a lot of time every day sitting in front of three 1920x1080 screens. That's 6,220,800 pixels to play with, and web developers are not using them well. Take Twitter.com, for example: the Tweet column is 496 pixels wide. That's 26% of the width of just one of my screens for all of the content on the site that I'm supposed to read and engage with. When I'm sitting 3 feet away, the text is small, and it's a small target for my mouse (I've sped up the cursor so I can efficiently pan across screens).

Startup Talent Bubble

Sun, Apr 22, 2012 - 12:47pm -- Isaac Sukin

I believe that the world of tech entrepreneurship is definitely in a bubble. But more than a startup bubble, we're in a coder talent bubble. Take a minute to read 2012 is for buying startups. Companies are getting bought not because they made anything of value or with a revenue model, they're getting bought more and more because the acquirers need more engineers. Have you looked at the list of sponsors for any hackathons lately? Huge companies (Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook come to mind) have sponsored several small hackathons reasonably close to the Philly area in just the past few months. They're not doing it mainly because it's a good thing to do, they're doing it because it's a recruitment tool and they desperately need to find engineers. (But keep doing it! Hackathons are awesome!) And then there's this phenomenon:

You have an idea. You need a website. Now what?

Sat, Apr 21, 2012 - 3:46pm -- Isaac Sukin

I have the unusual distinction of being a programmer in a business school that is currently experiencing something of a startup fever. Penn also happens to have a relatively small but enthusiastic CS community in which I consider myself active. One result of these circumstances is that I am frequently approached by students1 who have ideas for a business or have started a business that requires a website, but who have no idea where to start. I've been on the other side of that table too, hiring contractors for startups I've worked on. Here's the basic outline of how I answer this common question.

How you should accomplish getting a website built depends a lot on how fundamental the technology is to your business, how complex it is to build, how much money you have to spend, and what tradeoffs you're willing to make between quality and time.

Software and Innovative Thinking

Wed, Apr 18, 2012 - 2:07am -- Isaac Sukin

Tonight my roommate, who is British, turned to me and said,

The way I learned to think about problems in the U.K. is different than how Americans think about problems. When confronted with a task, I think first about the obstacles and how to overcome them. Americans seem to first identify the ideal solution and then consider what revisions may need to be made to make that solution realistic.

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