Over the past few days, I have enjoyed watching people discuss the need for building more programmers in our area. With Charlie throwing down the gauntlet for 250, Fred picking it up to 1000 and Nate offering his HoPE Manifesto, there seems to be a growing understanding for the need to grow our talent pool, instead of importing it - or fighting amoungst the other industries that pick it up.Charlie mentioned the NYCEDC's initiative to work with the existing academic groups to improve and enhance the engineering and programming talent - which I applaud for the effort, but worry about the implementation. As Charlie says, because of the City's own (and necessary bureaucracy), it has to be careful to thread the needle properly (I have gone through this gauntlet with the COSp effort over the past two years).
But discussing a need for growing 250 or 1000 developers does not make it happen. We need a plan to create these developers - and we can discuss how either working in collaboration with government and academia - or working with the practical experts in the field (like at RubyNuby or NYCPython) - or both.
Collaborative Programming Education
About two years ago, I had asked the nextNY community if they would be interested in coaching their own - sort of an apprentice program that would help grow our own programmers. I began the effort to create a program that would emulate the effort I had created at Cooper Union in 2007 which resulted in six projects that could potentially become startups in their own right.
Interestingly enough - all of the students had no prior knowledge of the language they were using (Ruby), no prior work with collaborative technologies (e.g., wikis, blogs, etc) and were required to learn the language and server infrastructure between themselves. Instead of grading the students on how well they learned the language or implemented the data structures or RoR framework - they were graded on the progress of their development. And, little did I know, they were using the Lean Startup Methodology in their efforts.
