¹

Dinner time brought a conversation between two well-educated women who jointly have two children under the age of two, two MBAs from Harvard Business School (three if you count their spouses), and serious fashion sense. One works for a well-known and recently-public Silicon Valley company; the other is an entrepreneur and former Wall Street investment banker. Among myriad other dinnertime topics was CodeAcademy. They’re both using that particular hot site to get up-to-speed in web development. One of them signed up for CodeYear. The other was talking just this afternoon with yet a third thirty-something woman entrepreneur and Ivy League b-school grad about—you guessed it—CodeAcademy.

Whence comes this new found interest in coding? Do we credit some mass hysteria embodied in the form of people who simply must engage in NP-completeness proofs? Fortunately, not. It comes from a profound reordering of today’s business world. “Coding is the new literacy,” says Zach Sims of CodeAcademy. Just as the well-educated of the 19th century read both Latin and Greek before learning “The Algebra,” so a 21st century entrepreneur must be able–at the very least–to understand the underpinnings of her own website.² And thus to direct the next step. And the next innovation. Will they develop the next algorithm for the solving of General Lattice Puzzles? Perhaps not. But will they understand all they need to understand in order to innovate in the dynamic, real-time environment which is twenty-first century innovation? Surely. Are they equally likely to avoid being snowed by their coders as their counterparts two decades ago were when presented by a “complex spreadsheet” model? Equally surely.

All of which puts those of us who think of themselves as lifetime coders—and therefore perhaps smugly considered themselves possessed of rare skills—on notice. Calculators and spreadsheets have ceded the field to Javascript (errr, ECMAScript) and MySQL (or various NoSQLs, if you’re really cool). Requisite knowledge now encompasses what, even a few years ago, was considered the domain of the “geeks.” Which means that I, for one, have a lot of skills development to do….

1. Coders will note that my “code” on the left is, in fact, merely markup—of this post, in fact. True. But it gave me a chance plug the absolutely gorgeous syntax highlighting of my new favorite text editor, Sublime Text. Quite possibly the most beautiful text editor I’ve ever used. Consider the tip a peace offering for conflating markup and coding.
2. The perspicacious and francophone reader will note that the correct word is ‘entrepreneuse,” but I refuse.

So, we’re back on the air.  Stay tuned….

(click for the full mosaic, 1,300+ books in all!)

Yes, that’s a geeky thing to do. But it highlighted a few things about my changing “digital existence” that I thought were worth reporting:

So Much Data
First and foremost, all of this data (the books, the covers, and even the photo I turned into the mosaic) were available with a few minutes worth of work. Admittedly, I had previously spent hours scanning the ISBN bar codes on my books (conveniently when packing my books in order to move to my new apartment). But think about the amount of data available to me for very little investment: the titles, authors, and graphic images of 1,300 some-odd books, along with their associated meta-data (length, ISBN, etc.). When I was in school (ending in the mid ’90s), gathering and manipulating this sort of data was certainly possible, but doing so was the domain of database experts, programmers, and the like. So I became one of those, mostly because I saw the computer as a tool which would facilitate information manipulation of a nature never previously possible−or indeed imagined.
Trumbull College, My residential college at Yale, for example, had a library boasting some 5,000 works. Its card catalog was positively ancient and poorly maintained. Estimates for the workload involved in cataloging it and keeping it up-to-date were so substantial that the (volunteer) project never got off the ground. A mere fifteen years later, my catalog is not only mostly up-to-date, but it contains all manner of “rich content” that a card catalog could not muster: images of the covers, other books by the same author, publication history, and of course the meta-data: reviews, social/popularity information, and even feedstock for inference and recommendation engines.

Community Creativity
Then there is the accessibility of the inspiration. LibraryThing cleverly suggested the mosaic and linked to David Louis Edelman‘s post in which he created a similar mosaic. Call it community scrapbooking, community arts and crafts, or simply community creativity, but this sort of cross-country “we all trade inspiration” is unusual, to say the least. To be sure, historically artist communes and even local arts and crafts fairs historically provided fodder and inspiration for our individual creativity, but this is a different kind of inspiration: it is both more instantaneous (I got the idea late last night; got a full night’s rest; and woke up and produced the mosaic before breakfast this morning) and more eclectic (David is a computer programmer and Science Fiction author in the Washington, DC area; I am a technology company CEO in Silicon Valley).

But Silos—Still
Unfortunately, it’s not all wine and roses. LibraryThing is the site I’ve always used to catalog my books, but recently Visual Bookshelf has won many converts, mostly because they have embraced the Facebook Platform API and have created a Facebook application. Since some 500 of my friends are on Facebook, and since many of them are avid readers, Visual Bookshelf has already netted me 40 some-odd “reading buddies” (which I define as other people I am friends with on Facebook and who have Visual Bookshelf profiles). An 8% cross-over rate isn’t bad, especially when you consider that Visual Bookshelf is only one of hundreds of Facebook applications. (And, for that matter, it’s one of the least annoying, since it doesn’t spam the hell out of your friends.) Here, for example, is my bookshelf, as displayed on Facebook, and what my friends are reading:

Unfortunately, I cannot synchronize my book activity on Visual Bookshelf with my LibraryThing account. Visual Bookshelf finally implemented a LibraryThing import feature, but it’s unidirectional. Likewise, Facebook makes it nearly impossible to export friend information (going so far as to display email addresses as images to foil screen scrapers and other brute force export tools). So I’m stuck maintaining two databases and importing one to the other, potentially over-writing or losing information each time I do so.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has noticed this problem, and it is but one example of the growing “problem” of social networking data living in proprietary silos. Such well-known Web 2.0 commentators as Om Malik have even gone so far as to propose that social networking features will end up getting built into most desktop and web software, much the same way as the Cut/Copy/Paste mechanism has become a de facto paradigm standard. But that will only work if the core social networking information (who is who and who knows whom) does not remain the proprietary information of, e.g., Facebook. Technologies from the simple XFN to the ambitious OpenSocial are supposed to fix that, but OpenSocial appears almost to have been promulgated by Google to compete with Facebook, and it will be a chilly day in the netherworld before Facebook adopts it. More recently, the DataPortability Working Group has been graced by the participation of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others (or at least representatives from those companies). But until something concrete develops, we early adopters will continue to enjoy the benefits of So Much Data and Community Creativity, but only if we’re willing to put up with duplicate data, lost data, and the other assorted horrors of manual synchronization.

All told, the information revolution continues in directions we never could have anticipated. Here I am trading notes with friends I haven’t physically seen in over a decade, enjoying better book recommendations from the wisdom of my friends (and the crowds) than I do by poking around my local bookstore, and finding a nice Sunday morning arts and crafts project inspired by a Washington, DC science fiction author whom I’ve never met.

Now if only I didn’t have to keep three copies of it all!

I finally lost patience with the limitations of Blogger and switched to WordPress. Along with the switch came a complete visual redesign, as well as the requisite re-posting of my prior posts and some ancillary dusting and clean-up. For those who don’t know it, WordPress is a superb blogging engine, built on PHP and MySQL (and often hosted on a web server running Apache). It’s a testament to the maturity of the tools today that I was able to get WordPress running on my Windows XP laptop as a test environment (which meant running PHP and MySQL, but using Microsoft’s IIS as the web server) in about two days (minor MySQL learning curve for me, since it was my first experience), and then that I was able to get the whole stack up and running on my hosting provider, BlueHost, in about half a day.

Building themes and functionality beyond the “out of the box” stuff in WordPress requires a working knowledge of CSS, XHTML and some PHP. I had the first two, but this was my first real exposure to PHP. So, off to the bookstore I went, and came home with O’Reilly’s Learning PHP 5. I read it, as I usually do with computer books, in one evening