HackerYou started unofficially on July 1st (Canada Day)! My wife and I walked across the bridge from our side (Gatineau) into Ottawa to meet the diverse people in the HackerYou program. The first Summer Academy cohort is rather impressive, we are diverse in almost every way (gender, race, nationality, background, goals etc.) and it seems we’re all determined to come out of this program with a new set of skills and a long list of new friends. »
I created my first website in 1998, during the days of Geocities, Tripod and and Angelfire. For more than a decade after that, I learned many marketable skills thanks to the culture of open source and sharing in the hacker community. »
Start typing “everyone should” into Google and Google wil recommend the phrase “everyone should learn to code”. Everyone from Bill Gates to Snoop Dogg are telling people that “every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code”. This is probably driven by the skills shortage in technology and the lack of a mainstream effort to get people involved in technology. Schools certainly don’t take computer studies as seriously as Science and Math. »
Students spend about 190 days per year in school for at least twelve years. A typical school day is about 7 hours, so in total students spend about 16000 hours in school before they graduate from high school. »
Eight months ago I started this blog with the intention of writing something at least once every week. I had just finished my Bachelors of Education and had very little to do. The education program at the University of Ottawa was a tremendous learning experience but the job market was depressing (and probably still is for some). New, excited and innovative people were graduating the program with a lot of passion but with very few opportunities here in Canada. »
Last week I moved some of the websites that I maintain to dreamhost and I have to say that it was a huge waste of time. I had trialled their servers for a couple of weeks before migrating and everything was fine but the server performance was atrocious as soon as they started charging me for hosting. »
Well I’ve finally decided to use this online space properly and put a blog on it. Whether I actually start to blog regularly will be interesting to see. Right now I am busy with many projects but I think I can find the time to blog every now and then :) »