text stringlengths 0 1.82k |
|---|
**Todd McLeod:** I'm not. I'm not writing a book about Go. I love being able to connect with people. I kind of view it as -- anthropologically we've learned from each other in person; that's the vast amount of our history through evolution as humans. We learned talking to each other, so in my trainings I really love tr... |
\[16:14\] I just really love that medium of teaching where it's online, it's a course, you can see what I'm showing you on the screen, you get the nuances of my voice, I could school you a little bit and give you direction and tell you to do this exercise (Go do it! Go do it now! Just pause the video, do the exercise!)... |
A lot of courses are just sort of a very narrated, reading a script, voiceover presentation or screencast. You can learn things from those, but it lacks that life and that vitality. I think that's again where that sort of artistic soul of mine comes in, where I love to create and think about the aesthetics of it, and w... |
So I'm not writing a book right now, but check this out! When I do a course, like me last course on HTML and CSS -- because when I was teaching it and when I got back into it, I couldn't find any materials that taught it the way I thought it should be taught, and there's a lot of things that would... Like, "Let's jump ... |
My last course that I created HTML and CSS, the outline (the outline!) for that course is 300 pages. So I'm not writing a book, but my courses are very thorough. Each lecture I'm documenting what I say, and what the points should be that you get from that lecture, so students can go back and Ctrl+F through it to find t... |
I just try to get people the tools they need to learn. That's my craft being an educator, how do I do it as well as possible and create the most beautiful and useful pieces of education material; like an architect might want - I want a beautiful and useful building... That kind of a deal, you know? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's awesome. We need to take our first sponsor break. |
**Break:** \[18:48\] |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Todd, you said that you don't like the idea of bootstrapping because you quickly reach a point where you don't know what you are doing because you don't have the foundation... Or maybe I'm interpreting more than what you said here, but I think that also has to do with what you said about Go being... |
**Todd McLeod:** Yeah, I really believe in minimalism and stripping things down and keeping everything as light as possible. Every line of code, you should know what it's doing and you should not have any extraneous code. If it's there and you're not using it, why is it there? |
That's actually one of the design practices, idioms of Go - you can't have a variable if you're not gonna use it; that's an error, right? And I love that about Go. It's similar for me in everything I approach, like in my house - I don't wanna have stuff around if I'm not using it. Pass it on, donate it, let somebody el... |
With HTML and CSS, I'm not a fan of frameworks and libraries. Yeah, they get a lot of things done for you quickly, and if you understand the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, JavaScript enough to be able to go in and know what they're doing, and tweak them and adjust them when you need to do that - fantastic, use them all day... |
So if you look at metrics, and I'm really into building websites now, and we're putting together a website ourselves, which I'm very excited about, and performance is so key, it's such a key metric... When you look at studies on performance, like Amazon lowers their time by one hundred milliseconds and sales go up 1%, ... |
Instead, we extract SVGs, run them through Illustrator, get that SVG and then stick that code in. That costs us maybe 7 kb, or 5 kb on that page for those images. |
\[23:56\] So just keeping things lean, and having complete control over your codebase, and a thorough understanding of your codebase - to me, that's what it means to be a craftsperson. This is very much a craft; it's the craft of building software. And just as somebody like a woodworker, they would know all the tools i... |
So that's my approach - just to do things well. When I looked at server-side languages, different languages approach things in different ways, but Go seemed to me to be the one that was the most zen - coming back to that word, zen - and the one that is the most fundamental. You're working down at a low level and you un... |
I don't know if that answered your question, Carlisia, but being a programmer's language - and I don't have the depth of experience with Ruby, I never did any Ruby, but from what I've heard of Ruby, it's like there's a lot of magic. Also, from what I saw at Python and Django, it's like "Hey, put in a couple of lines of... |
Sometimes I say "Go suffers no fools!" Kind of like the Pirate Ride at Disneyland... \[laughter\] Deeeeead meeen teeell nooo taaaales! Goooo suuuuffers nooo fooools! Because I'll hit these walls where I'm like, "I have no idea what is happening there", and Go has humbled me so many times. It brought me to my knees with... |
So it doesn't suffer fools. I mean, it's got \[unintelligible 00:27:42.12\] it's got a slice to bite. I mean, it gets down to all of your data structures and everything, and ... I just gotta ramble a little bit more about Go - this is one of the things I love about Go: innovation. Technology is about innovation, and fo... |
\[28:10\] A lot of people, as I've met people learning the language, they're like "How come it doesn't have generics? This isn't OOP... Where is the inheritance?" \[laughs\] I'm like, "You're a programmer! You create things that innovate. You need to innovate, too", and I feel like that's what they did with Go. |
They looked at, "Hey, this is how programming's evolved - spaghetti code, procedural, structured OOP"... They looked at research, like Tony Hoare's CSP, and then they said, "Let's integrate all that and do this new thing." When I first started to learn Go, people were like "Go's all about types. It's all about types." ... |
I feel like Go innovated and took programming and tried to bring it to the next level. Whatever name you might put on that, but from spaghetti to procedural structured OOP to the next evolution of coding. So it's a programmer's language and it suffers no fools, because you gotta know what's going on, and to really use ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I love the description that you gave. You threw a lot of concepts in there, and there's a lot we could unpack from what you said, but I think at the base of what you said, you're equating a real language with craftsmanship, and I agree with that. I think a lot of languages have so many options th... |
**Bill Kennedy:** Todd, you're day in and day out in the classroom with people at all skill levels, and one of the things where at least GoBridge is really focused on going into next year is how do we take people who have never programmed before and want to program and get them learning programming with Go? There's lot... |
**Todd McLeod:** I love the adage of teaching that "the expert makes everything easy." Somebody who's super skilled with the language can, if they also have the ability to teach, and that's true with any subject. They could then convey difficult things simplistically. I feel like I'm just starting to hit stride with te... |
You know, the first thing that came to mind, Bill, is I did a presentation here at a little tech event we had in Fresno, and gave everybody an introduction in the language and I made a video about that on YouTube. We could put that video in the show links. If there's people out there who are interested in Go, you're wa... |
\[32:23\] In terms of teaching people, like "Okay, GoBridge - we wanna reach out to people, disadvantaged populations also, and people who've had no experience with computers or maybe didn't grow up with a lot of access to computers...", I think that the next thing that comes to mind is reach them when they're young, i... |
**Bill Kennedy:** Let me interrupt you real quick, because this is kind of what I'm looking for. Natalie, who lives in Berlin, has been giving classes to beginner-beginners. One of the things that she's noticed - and these are the kind of things that we as people who wanna educate won't learn until we get into the clas... |
**Todd McLeod:** I think that that's a really key point to teaching anything, but a lot of people have difficulty asking questions. That, I think, is something that teachers need to be informed about - you really need to encourage your students, "Hey, ask questions!" That's your job as a student. If you knew everything... |
I remember when I was in grad school I would ask questions, I would ask questions, I would ask questions, and professors would be like, "Okay, come see me in the office hour, because you're the only one with questions." Then, after class, people would be like, "Thank you so much for asking those questions, I don't get ... |
So it is hard for people to ask questions, and I think just bringing that human element and connecting with your students and creating that atmosphere where they feel comfortable, and where it's fine to not get it... There's a saying that I came up with one time, "The more I admit I don't know, the higher I go. The hig... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I think that there is definitely a social factor in people not wanting to admit that there are things that they don't know, and I think it changes in different cultures, too. It's a lot stronger in the American culture from what I've seen, and there are definitely other cultures where people have a ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** You know what, I'm going to risk and say it might be a universal thing, because I grew up in Brazil and my elementary, all the way up to high-school was done in Brazil. Like Todd, I was the one asking the questions all the time, sometimes up to the point of being a pain in the butt, and 90% of th... |
**Todd McLeod:** \[36:06\] Alright, enough theory. Let's model it. Let's all start admitting what we don't know. \[laughter\] Right now. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Well, I can tell you one way to figure out what you don't know - by using Backtrace, our second sponsor. |
**Break:** \[36:18\] |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Talking about beginners and teaching, I have a question for Todd that's more generic. I would like to know your opinion about whether kids should learn how to program early on? I will volunteer my opinion - I say usually kids should not be spending time programming early on. Maybe when they are e... |
I'd much rather have kids spending extra time in writing, rather than programming. When they get to a point where they can assimilate things at a faster rate, which will be when they are older, they can pick up programming really quickly. People think that they need to get kids into programming early because it takes s... |
**Todd McLeod:** The students that I've seen that started programming really young, they did that because they had a passion for it. I haven't seen any tiger parents who are like, "I'm gonna make my kid program. He's gonna be the next \[unintelligible 00:39:02.05\] of programming." I haven't seen that in our community,... |
I think it's fantastic if kids could program before 13. I also think if we're gonna force certain subjects on students (reading, writing, arithmetic) I think coding needs to be in there. That needs to be your bread and butter. That's the new math, that's the way we do calculations for engineering tasks. Like yeah, you ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[39:48\] I'd rather see official logic, first. I'd rather have a formal training in real logic than programming first. I think programming is an extension to math and logic, so a good background in math and then logic and then programming would help programmers. I think one of the things that I stu... |
**Todd McLeod:** Oh, cool. |
**Bill Kennedy:** When I think about teaching beginners, I'm always focused on what is that visual aspect to it? Because I feel if there isn't a visual aspect it's really hard, because everything's just abstracted. So how do you bring a visual aspect that is reasonable to that beginner programmer, so they can really se... |
**Todd McLeod:** Yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** This is kind of off-topic, but it just reminded me... I traded in my Mac on a Surface Book a month ago, and I've been on the road for an entire month with the Surface Book training, and it's been awesome, I really love it. But one of the things that really stood out for me as an exceptional reason t... |
**Todd McLeod:** That's awesome. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I was blown away. I didn't realize just how much the ability to draw live on the screen would make a big difference. It's just a totally random thought, but it's part of that whole visual thing. |
**Todd McLeod:** Yeah, I like that. |
**Bill Kennedy:** And Todd, you know I live on the whiteboard in the classroom. |
**Todd McLeod:** Yeah. |
**Bill Kennedy:** Do you use a whiteboard in your classroom at all? How do you do that visual piece when you're in your classroom? |
**Todd McLeod:** Yeah, totally, I use a whiteboard. It depends upon what I'm trying to convey, but it's another tool at my disposal, so when the situation calls for it, I like the whiteboard. Also, I've just started for my online courses - instead of trying to photoshop something out and make a diagram, I just get a bl... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.