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**Jaana Dogan:** But a logic analyzer is the printf of working with these protocols, and people were so surprised that I have scopes and all these logic analyzers around. But it's just like a mandatory requirement. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. So you start with something like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, and you can look at that and you might be able to debug from a website the commands that you're sending, but ultimately you end up on GPIO pins and communicating with other hardware. At that point, you're cut off, and it's really pai... |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah. And sort of like trying to understand what is going on with the kernel driver... I've been exposed to a couple of bugs - it was impossible to get anything done without actually looking at the final output of the signal. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think it's fun for people to learn at the hardware level, too. I love having oscilloscopes, plugging it on audio wire and looking at what audio actually looks like... |
**Jaana Dogan:** When I was a child, my father introduced us into signal processing by just looking at oscilloscope output, and I gathered so much information from there by just... I remember we had a very small set of -- we were just producing some sign wave, and looking at it and changing the frequency, and it just g... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I was teaching my son a while back... Using an oscilloscope we made almost like a theremin, just a 555 timer and a little light sensor. He had a blast with it until we got annoyed with the high-pitched sound that it made. I didn't quite think that went through, that he would love this thing a... |
\[12:08\] So is hardware your true passion, and kind of where it meets software? Or is this just something you do to break away from the software side? |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah, more of the latter. I have a full-time job which is already boring. I think my entire projects have grown with the necessity of me having to design or prototype a hardware for my music experimentation. I still try to build instruments, rather than working on the... I don't know how to say this, b... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think that typically is what I do, too. Mine sits for months on end sometimes. I think I like thinking about that I might one day have the time to work on some secret project I have in my head. Then I create new ones without ever finishing the one prior. It's like, "Oh, I wanna help with bu... |
**Jaana Dogan:** I think that's the beauty of all this maker thinking. We are always in this constantly "work in progress" projects; we invent by looking at what is going on and what is in common... I think we are doing this for the joy, rather than trying to achieve anything. I think that's fair. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I wanted to go back a little bit, and I didn't jump in right away because I was looking for the link. Erik once mentioned the course called NAND To Tetris, and I'm super looking forward to doing it. I think I'm going to be able to do it next year. |
It's basically a course that takes you from the very basics, and step by step all the way up to building a modern computer. And the good news for me is that it's all simulation, and I don't have to deal with hardware. |
**Jaana Dogan:** Nice. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I personally don't have anything against hardware; as I was saying, they just don't work with me... I don't know, I just have this impression. But in this case it's all simulation, and you don't have to... And it gets expensive too, buying these one-off things. But this is really cool. |
I'm saying this because I also think it's very important for us to learn a little bit more about what it is that's below of what we are doing. |
**Jaana Dogan:** I totally agree. In order to contribute to the first argument, I think simulation is really important. For Brillo, my co-workers were more passionate about building a graphical interface that allows people to understand what it feels like to work with GPIO, rather than work in anything else. The number... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[15:55\] I think that there's cheap ways people can do electronics too, and I wanna say that to make electronics work is like learning through discovery, or something like that. The number of components that you need is pretty small, and I think it's nice to have that hands on, and for people to l... |
The NAND To Tetris book that Carlisia was talking about - I love that book. The one thing I don't like is that chapters go really fast, so you kind of need supplemental learning material, but it starts at kind of like gates and boolean logic, how to build a NAND gate, and then how those are kind of assembled. Then you ... |
The thing that I love about the book is each stage is kind of on its own, and they have a way of unit testing your stuff. When you try to build your assembly language, it has expected inputs and outputs so it can validate it. |
It's a really cool experience for people who are interested in learning from the hardware level up into the code that we write every day. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And they have a course on Coursera, too. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh, they have it on Coursera now? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, so they have the book and they have a course on Coursera. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah... So Brian isn't on the show because of choppy internet connection where he's at in London, but he's heckling us from Slack. He just reminded me of the person who built the ALU in Minecraft using the same book as his approach, which was really interesting. You set the binary number with torch... |
I'll find a link to the video where somebody is messing with it, it's hilarious. You wonder, "Who sits there and thinks of that?" Like, "Oh, I just did this NAND To Tetris thing. You know what I should build an ALU with? Minecraft!" \[laughter\] |
**Jaana Dogan:** Very cool. I kind of feel like we were the last generation who has some sort of privilege to understand everything, from end to end. When I was a child, the personal computers were so small... I remember having a Spectrum, and its manual was basically starting with BASIC programming language. The compu... |
By looking at the current complexity of the things, I think the current generation doesn't have the same privilege to learn and understand everything from end to end. What Raspberry Pi was trying to do was trying to make things more accessible. I think all the Linux boards are doing a better job now, but everything is ... |
When I introduce myself, that I'm supposed to be a power Go user, and giving people, the team, usability API design feedback, maybe initiating libraries and tooling to fill the gaps... If there's any experimentations required, probably I have more time to run experimentations, so it's part of my responsibility. And I'm... |
\[20:02\] One of the things that Brian was mentioning is this feedback around tooling. I wanna understand, rather than specific bugs and complaints, what are the bigger picture problems. If we would like to rethink our tooling, what should we fix and how should we fix it? This involves an understanding of the current w... |
I'm kind of surprised by the number of people who actually returned back to me and wrote about how they feel about certain things, things that maybe need to be redesigned or can be supported by experimental tools or extension tools. I'm really excited to hear more, and I do believe as a community or as a language we wi... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I'm wondering if you are using any guideline or if you are trying to go in a specific direction to avoid having the vocal minority speak for the issues that are not a priority for maybe the majority of the people. Or maybe you're looking into having usability as the guide for what you are doing, ... |
**Jaana Dogan:** Absolutely. The goal of this project is not trying to understand what the established users are trying to do... Let me give a little bit of insight of how I see things. I think there are too many reasons why people learn a language or just get involved in a language. The first one is personal developme... |
The other type of people comes there just because it's a requirement. It's enforced by your employer, school, whatever. I think our community was so dominated by the first group that we couldn't really question too much about how we're treating the newcomers and what is missing. For a person that is not coming from the... |
I think our language and tooling is totally built on historical conventions, but are we doing anything to communicate them? Are people getting lost just because they cannot make the connections? |
I really liked Katrina's talk at GopherCon this year because she was pretty clear about this. When I looked at the spec, I understood everything, but I wasn't able to make the connections and was not able to line up all the different topics around the sentence I was reading. I think it's generally true for everything, ... |
I think we are coming from a typical background, and everything is so much clearer to us, but not true for the vast majority in tech. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And have you been able to at least have some insights about things that can be done to make that better? |
**Jaana Dogan:** \[24:05\] My audience is a little bit restricted. I cannot really go to people who are coming from totally different backgrounds and I cannot enforce them to use Go and give them feedback. The only way I see which might be valuable but it's still not ideal - because it's a small subset of the same cult... |
I think the main goal of rethinking about these problems is to make newcomers happy, rather than working for the existing users. Because existing users already know what they need to do. |
**Cory LaNou:** When you talk about newcomers, I'm curious if you're primarily targeting the traditional newcomers that are just coming off of projects that Go is gonna just work better for or are you actually targeting people coming from the different fields of technology, technology that Go is not already being used ... |
**Jaana Dogan:** I'm particularly targeting people who either have experience - or inexperienced - in another language, and just trying to use Go as a replacement. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** It sounds to me that one challenge that you have is to help people see the benefits of Go without going through so much hassle. Because people can read a blog post, "Oh, Go is very productive and Go is very fast" are the positives, but they still have to commit to trying it out. And maybe making ... |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah, this kind of also relates to the first initial idea I had, how I see people... I still see people who already believe that this language could be valuable for themselves and trying to invest time in this language has a little bit more tolerance. I understand what you're saying, but I don't have a... |
Maybe what we need to do is more of like typical user studies where we just put people who absolutely have no background in our material and see how well they're going and how they feel, as a feedback. |
**Cory LaNou:** Do you think it's the language features that is the time that we have to spend the investment on for newcomers? I say that because when I came to Go, everything was easy. I mean that from the standpoint of like using other languages, there was a lot of work; there was a big environment to set up; you ha... |
It sounds funny, right? We're trying to optimize for these newcomers and give them the onboard faster, and I think that's great, but I also feel like it's phenomenal compared to most other languages already. So I'm curious what aspects do you think that can be improved the most? |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[28:01\] I'd like to kind of jump in here too, because there's one area that I think we can improve in. When we look at the walkthrough online, the Go tutorial - it goes through a lot of the language features, but some of this stuff is not necessarily approachable just in domain knowledge. |
One instance I know of somebody who's going through the tutorial and got hung up on one of the things, and I think he was just working with slices or arrays or something like that, but the object of that particular chapter was to build bitmaps, or something like that. And it was really confusing just understanding what... |
One of our sponsors, Code School... In the Ruby world they had the Rails For Zombies thing, and people could connect with that. They're building this little game and it deals with zombies and things like that, and it makes things a lot more approachable because understanding the domain isn't there anymore. It's not und... |
Actually, on that note, before we continue back into this, I guess it's kind of like a perfect transition because one of our sponsors is actually Code School, and they've just launched a new Electives course, for anyone wanting to get started in Go. |
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