Future of Coding - Research Recap Eight: Life & Work Planning

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

Back in action after my two-week, sore-throat-induced hiatus, I reflect on my work over the past weeks on my Life Plan and Work Plan. If you make it to the end of this episode, you’ll also get some off-the-cuff tips for ergonomic workstation design. You can view the notes for this episode here: futureofcoding.org/episodes/16-research-recap-eight-life-and-work-planning.htmlSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to the Future of Coding. This is Steve Krause. Welcome to episode 16, Research Recap 8, where I talk about my life plan and also continue talking about my work plan. So I'm really excited to be back. As you probably noticed, I missed the past two weeks, the first weeks that I actually missed releasing episodes, which is a bit of a bummer to lose the streak there. But I do have a good excuse, I have a note

from my doctor. I finally am at the end today of a two week cold that has been really frustrating, but I think I'm at the end. You still might hear the remnants of it in my voice, but I hope that my voice lasts me the rest of this podcast. Okay, so let's get right into it. So if you're following my journal, my day-to-day progress that I put in my journal, you will also have noticed that I have been much less consistent in the past two weeks as I recover from this cold. Thanks for bearing with me. I got a really fun message from a new friend who said he read through my entire journal on a train and it took him, and you you know it's a few months of journal entries and uh i think the phrase he used was it felt like he was reading my my brain and then all of a sudden

it stopped and uh and he was sad um and so if if i i expect there aren't many people who are so closely following my progress but if you are you will see that the journal has been officially slash journal has been officially deprecated. And you can continue following my day to day progress at future of coding slash log, which currently redirects you directly to the commits page on GitHub. And you can see that each commit is now structured kind of like how I used to have my daily journal thoughts. And sometimes those thoughts are

associated with changes I've made to the repo. Sometimes it's just thoughts without any changes to the repo. That page is definitely not as pretty as it could be and I hope to fix that soon. So as you know, if you listened to the last research recap episode, I was inspired by my friend Juan Bennett to zoom out and think about my work on this project more ambitiously and more strategically. So I began working on that. I didn't get too far before I realized that, you know what, I'm confused as to how this work quote master plan fits into my broader life. And how do I balance doing work when I set aside time to do work and then when my mom

calls and asks for help with something something how do i balance those things and so i took uh i set aside a day i think it was a monday maybe two or three weeks ago to spend the entire day uh journaling about my life plan that kind of just flowed out of me all in one day it took like eight hours of me just standing at the computer without stopping and it was exhausting. But I made it through and I had something that was pretty much what I wanted to publish. I got, I sent it around to my closest friends and family for feedback, made the, made the updates and published it to Facebook. And it was, I got a really fun reception actually.

Google analytics said that like 60 people spent 15 minutes on it because you know it's a 5,000 word article so that's about how long it takes to read and it felt like all 60 people who made it to the end actually reached out and told me they liked it which was really meaningful to me and I feel like it made the point for me about why I'm so public with all my thoughts particularly my in-progress thoughts like like the ones that that you're hearing at this very moment because a lot of my friends reached out and said, wow, like, you know, this has inspired me to be more reflective and to think things and put my priorities and

philosophy in place. So here, let me tell you about a bit this life plan I put together. Most importantly, I established my priorities. I think I have ten priorities on there. I keep tweaking them a little bit as I like, you know, try and live them and see how they aren't exactly precise. And then I update them. I think most relevant on this podcast is to say that work is number eight. The first seven priorities are about like, you know, other parts of my life my family my partner my closest friends then work then my extended family and and my the remainder of my close of my close friends it would be like nine and ten I also got clearer

about my life's mission what I called it in that in life's mission. What I called it in my life plan, I called it, quote, enabling thinking, which I think is a decent phrase. It's very, very similar to Doug Engelbart's goal of, quote, augmenting humans. I've made it partway through that 1962 research paper and I've been really really impressed as you know Chris Granger and Brett Victor said I would so I'm really excited to keep working through that and I think as another way to think about my life's mission is maybe communication or media because I really am all about communicating precisely to computers, precisely to yourself, and precisely to other people. Those are really the areas in which I care. And I guess also communicating ideas to children

or children communicating ideas to themselves in terms of learning. So that's kind of, and media, and how media helps us communicate better. And media doesn't have to be like technology or paper. You know, there are certain ideas that help us communicate better with others and ourselves. And these ideas or patterns, you know, languages and media, patterns of speech are different, are media and like technology. So anyways, I've since discovered that I'm basically a media studies person, which is kind of funny because my whole life until I learned about media studies, I thought it

was kind of like a wishy-washy, lame subject matter, but now it is my subject matter, which is exciting. Yeah, and to be clear, I spent, I plan to spend the next 10 or 20 years, approximately, maybe less, maybe more, was working on a subsection of this life's mission, particularly enabling people to communicate their ideas with computers, also known as computer science or coding. So I expect that'll take, you know, a few decades and then I'll feel like that, that I've kind of wrapped up my, what needs to be done there. I've added what I need to add to that conversation and then I'll maybe, then I'll move on to other areas as I've alluded to

in different places. I think I could, I have, I could, I have thoughts that I think are interesting in media for science. Before I do that, I'll need to do a lot of research into the philosophy of science and epistemology and philosophy. But I think I have an interesting perspective there, even before I do all that research. But before I go off the app and I'll need to do my history history just like I am doing that here. For example, like how I'm reading Doug Engelbart. Another thing that you'll notice when you look at my life plan is that I dropped the word, quote, master from the plan. So it's just a life plan, not my life master plan. And again, I'm doing that here with my future of coding plan. In the last episode, I called it my master plan.

I'm just calling it my plan because there are weird negative connotations with the word master. So I'm just cutting it out. All right, so let me tell you about my future of coding plan. It is still in progress. I am on version three or so right now. So let me tell you about that. Because, you know, as I've explained in the past, I think it's important that I give you the in-progress, you know, history of how I come up with my ideas, as well as the ideas themselves. So there are really two things.

Like, I want to show you my work, and it's going to be messy, and I'm going to cross things out, and it's gonna be messy, I'm gonna cross things out, and you'll see the eraser marks. And then I'm going to produce a polished draft that's available for broader consumption. So but this right, we're about to tell you about the three versions of my future coding plan. This and basically this entire, this entire episode is all about my in progress thoughts. All this is me show my in-progress thoughts.

This is me showing my work. If you aren't curious about my work and you just want the final version, you can go look for that on the internet in the coming weeks. I'm sure I'll also be producing talks that I give at conferences about this stuff. So you could, you could do that. And, and I think probably soon I will reserve time for podcasts that are polished podcasts. They aren't interviews with others and they aren't my stream of consciousness talking like, like you're having now. They'll be kind of more me reading a piece of polished writing that i've done um i'm copying that kind of format from sam

harris because he he does he does all three things he he tells you about housekeeping notes it's what he calls them and he also you know will read an essay of his aloud and then he'll also interview other guests. Okay, so the first version of my master plan was on the futurecoding.org slash about. I would describe that page as a good summary of my efforts on this project over the past two years. More than anything else it justifies and explains the current path that I was on. Then last week I saw that Chris Granger's Strange Loop keynote was live and so I immediately dropped whatever it was I was doing and watched that to the end and was, you know, blown away.

He's just such a high-quality thinker. I one day dream to have thoughts that are as amazing as his and to be able to share them in such an accessible way. And so, you know, and I think, yeah, I already mentioned that. The reason I'm now obsessed with Doug Engelbart is because that Chris Granger mentioned him in that talk. So thanks again to Chris. But I guess maybe more importantly, Chris inspired me to write version two of the plan. So this I actually wrote on futureofcoding.org slash plan. This is the first version of what I did on slash plan. Then after this, I wrote another version where I basically deleted all that and pasted some new content in there.

Before I tell you about the third version, futureofcoding.org slash plan V2, let I tell you about the third version, futureplan.org slash plan v2, let me tell you about the first version. It's very, it's much more open-ended and questioning than my first version on slash about. I really try and think about this problem from first principles. And I think probably the most important part of this version of my plan is when I try and categorize my dozen or two dozen ideas on how to move forward here into six distinct categories. And the way I make these categories is the distinction between who is my user and who is my customer. Who uses my product, who am I building for, and who sustains me financially.

Those are often the same person, but I think just as often they're two different people. So my three customers that I talked about that I put in this table are one, students, number two, adults, and number three, people like you who are listening to this, people who are in the future programming community trying to bring the future of programming to the present. And I thought about, you know, who would be my customer for each of those. And so I think for each user category, I had two different customers. So then I had six categories. And I really was confused and was going back and forth between the different categories and the different ideas. And I thought it was going to take me a long time at my computer, solo, meditating on the different categories and the different ideas before I settled on my strategy.

That's what I thought. And then I spoke about these ideas to a lot of friends and they gave their perspectives. And in particular, I got coffee with my friend, Dan Shipper, a long-term friend of mine and also a listener uh to this podcast so hi dan if you're listening and so dan took took one look at my table of six ideas and said oh clearly number five is the one for you i was like yeah yeah no i know that it seems like that's a good one but the other ones are actually good let me tell you about them i told him a bit about the other ones and he's like no but listen like five is the one and he told me about why he thought it was the one I was like okay let me humor him let's play it out we thought about it for a little while and by the end of the conversation I was like you know what

I think you're right I think five is the one wow that was fast and Dan looked at his watch and said yeah it's only three o'clock what you gonna do with the rest of the day and then I went home I told my girlfriend about it and and she was like, yeah, that, that, that sounds like a good thought to me, you know, I was kind of surprised it took you so long to get there, and then I told my, my, my parents, and my mom said, um, yeah, it, it sounds like, uh, sounds like that's, that's a good one for you, well, actually, actually, I'm just realizing now that I didn't actually tell you which one number five is. So let me tell you. Number five is with you all being my main user.

So producing content for you guys. And it'll mostly be writing content, but it'll also be podcast content like you're listening to right now. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me first tell you how I've been more clearly articulating my goal. So I think it's kind of a trite thing to say, but if you don't know where you're going, then you don't know whether or not you're already there or even how to get there. So I think it's really important to very, very clearly articulate your precise goal. Where are you trying to get? If for nothing else, you know when you're there. There's a lot of things for me to do,

and it would be great if I could finish this project and move on to these other things. But the only way that I'll be able to do that is if I know when I'm done. And so I almost try to create the rubric for what it'll look like when I'm done so I can move on to the next thing. And I need to spend a lot more time over this next week and the next week thinking about that and what that would look like so that I can recognize it when it happens.

I think this will also help a problem that I've been having. In the past when other people show me programming languages that others have made, I get a little nervous like, oh no, what if they've beat me to the punch? What if they've like created what I want to create? I think this will hopefully give me the opposite perspective of like, oh my goodness, hopefully these guys have made what I want because if they have, then I can move on to other things. Okay, so while I need more time to our more clearly articulate the goal what i've my my working goal working title goal is that i my goal is to create a programming language that's as powerful as javascript but as easy to use as

facebook and those people say yep yep that makes sense that's that's clear and also damn that's really ambitious and wow that would really change the world if that existed. It would really empower millions and billions of people to create things with software. It would really truly realize Steve Jobs' vision for the iPhone, sorry, the computer as the bicycle for the mind. One of my friends, only one, friend Jonathan Long, who you heard on episode two of this podcast, maybe episode three, he was the only one to say, but Steve, you know that Facebook is really hard to use, right? It's like, you know, terrible interface. Maybe you should say like, it's easy to use as Instagram. I said, ah, Jonathan, good, good question. I actually did that on purpose.

I know that Facebook is actually a really hard thing to use. I know this because I help my mom using it all the time and it's very confusing for her. And I also have my grandma use different apps on the iPhone and it's really hard for them. So I know these things are hard and yet billions of people can still use Facebook so and what I mean by this is you know if I could make programming as easy to use as Instagram I would do it I don't think it could be made much easier to use in Facebook but I think it could be as easy as Facebook, which still isn't that easy, but it's much,

much easier than it is right now. So I did put a little bit more thought behind the terms JavaScript and Facebook than you might have thought. Okay, so let me tell you more about my strategy of how to accomplish this. So I think it really comes down to whether or not I want I'm going to build one thing, or help other people build many things. And so building one thing would look like me building either wolf into a bigger platform or building a database platform that's easier to use, or building a user interface building platform like stream sheets, stream sheets that's easier to use, or building a user interface building platform like StreamSheets that's easier to use. Those would all be me doing one specific idea to make the world better. And that's usually how people make the world better in this context. They build

one product and they stick with it until it's done, or until it's in a good enough place that they can leave it with a CEO or something like that. Another strategy is I can help other people do their ideas. One way to do that is to be an investor where I could start a venture capital firm. I could go raise money, a few million dollars, and invest in people like you who are starting companies in this space. That's another idea, which the jury isn't out on, but I don't think is what I want to do. I think what I want to do is spend my time doing research onto really, really in-depth research and prototyping and customer interviews,

really, really in-depth research and put together a series of theses about what i think needs to be built in this space for the world and why and how can we build and and where and what my sources are etc etc and publish these things for the world um and also also get tons of feedback on them so so it's not just my ideas but it's really the whole community's ideas and publish these ideas and then hopefully encourage and inspire and connect other people around these ideas to make them into realities. So that's my general strategy. Before I tell you more about it, let me tell you about what some of my my friends and I have said about it. I was on the phone with my brother a

few days ago and I said, you know, I figured it out. I think basically I'm going to be equal parts Elon Musk, as in the Hyperloop, Andre Salt, as in how he developed Cycle.js and the blog posts that he publishes about

user interfaces and the future of the web, Nikki Case and his Explorable Explanations and Patreon, Brett Victor's Essays and Talks, and the future of the web, Nikki Case and his explorable explanations, and Patreon, Brett Victor's essays and talks, and then also Sam Harris as far as thinking in public goes.

And my brother finishes my sentence with, and zero parts humble, which is what brothers are for. My co-founder Eli thought this clearly made sense for me. My mom says that, you know, in order to do do this I'm going to really have to build my brand. My dad who is coming from the world of private equity and finance was a little confused and kind of shook his head and said, you keep teaching me.

My grandma was really excited about this idea and said, I better take care of myself. This gives me incentive to live long enough to see what you come up with, which was so sweet. It really melted my heart. One thing that I found myself saying was that I feel like this is the right path of all the other paths I've considered, because this is the one path that I'm actually really terrified of, both success and failure. It really lights me up, this idea,

where the other ideas more kind of felt less me, more forced. And last night I was walking with my friend Ben Yee and I told him that my goal is to be a thought leader and he said, Ben said, thought leader? You mean pretentious asshole? And then through through some discussion he said that I should call myself either a scholar or a researcher instead of a thought leader. And then in talking to my parents later last night, they said that I might want to just go with writer. Writer and podcaster, maybe. Anyways, titles and other things. TBD, to be determined later.

As things continue. Okay, so here's the basic dream. A few years ago, Elon Musk saw California's plan to build a train from San Francisco to LA. And he took one look at it and was like, that looks like it's way too expensive, will take way too long to build, and will be a terrible product. And so he put together a team of researchers, and they spent a few months, I assume, I don't actually know the details. And they put together this plan called the Hyperloop. And it's just this paper, I don't know, it's like a few dozen pages, and they published it.

And the internet exploded and all of a sudden groups of people started organizing themselves and and tens of millions of dollars started marshalling itself to make this plan a reality and that is just magical and that I think is is my the dream for what I want to do just figure out through through tons and tons of research analysis what needs to be done and give the ideas for free away to the world and inspire them to take them. And yes, I do recognize how silly it sounds and I recognize how hard it will be to convince people that these ideas are worth devoting their lives to. I have often quoted Eric Ries when particularly his line where he says, you know, if you're so scared that someone else is going to steal your startup idea, here's an experiment. Make it your job for your biggest competitor, whoever it is that you're

scared of stealing your idea, Google, Facebook, whoever, and make it your job to convince them to take your idea. And I bet if you spent your full-time job, 40 hours a week calling them, doing whatever it is to convince them to take your idea, you wouldn't be successful. And well, I'm trying to make that my job. I convince other people to steal my ideas. And we'll see how it goes. I think an even better example of how this has played out in the past is with Brett, Victor, and me. So when I was 18, 19 years old, I went to my first ever hackathon, Pen Apps, in the winter of 2013, January 2013, and I was partnered

up with, among two others, Omar Rizwan, and we were sitting in the audience of the hackathon, we were waiting our turn to present what we'd made. And while we were waiting, Omar and I were talking and he said, you know what, it really sounds like you'd like this article called Learnable Programming by Brett Victor. And so he pulled it up. I was like, wow, that looks really neat. And so I read the article and it blew my brain. And then of course, after it, I read Mindstorms by Seymour Papert, because he implores us I read Mindstorms by Seymour Papert because he implores us to read Mindstorms by Seymour Papert three times in the article. So really the fact that the coding space exists can be traced back to that essay, Literal Programming, by Brett Victor and the fact that WoofJS exists

can be traced back to that one essay. And if you think about it, Brett Victor didn't write that essay, so I would build WoofJS. He built it so that people would learn these core concepts about what a learnable programming system would look like, and many people will build many things that look like WoofJS. But at the same time, if you actually look at the contents of what he wrote about. See he asks you to look past what he's actually writing about to the deeper principles, but if you don't do that, if you don't do what he says, and you look at the actual words that he writes, and he's actually talking about how Processing.js' environment and language are terrible for these few dozen reasons.

And Woof.js really is the answer to that. Woof.js is Processing.js, you know, very, very similar to Processing.js. It's a JavaScript library in the browser for kids who want to learn to code. But for each of the ways, not for everyone, but for almost all of the ways in which Processing processing JS is subpar in Brett Victor's world, Woof.js is par or above par for reasons that I articulate in the announcement post I published when I released Woof.js almost two years ago, a year and a half ago. So I think I released Woof.js maybe five, six years after Brett Victor released a learnable programming essay. And so, you know, if you think about it, Brett Victor did this.

He released an essay about what he thinks should exist and the problems and what does exist and then, you know, it took a few years but eventually I went ahead and actually built those things in the real world. And it exists. Thousands of kids use it, month. And I think maybe one day millions of kids will use it every day. And none of that would have happened if Brett Victor didn't write Learnable Programming. And even the coding space wouldn't exist if Brett Victor didn't write Learnable Programming. And yes, I'm a special case, but how many special cases do we need in order to solve this problem? A few hundred? A few thousand?

If I inspire a few thousand people to work on the most important ideas in the future of programming, I think we can solve this problem. I think we can make the programming environment that we're all dreaming of. And so that's my strategy. I know it's going to be hard, but that's what I'm shooting for. I want to really inspire people. And here's the kicker. So I read Learn More Programming by Brett Victor.

Then I watched his article, Inventing Our Principle, and I was just blown away. I woke up the next morning and wrote an email to him saying basically, you know, dear Brett, I just watched your essay I read your essay I watched your video and I'm convinced to do whatever it is to help you like I'm convinced to like commit my life to helping you I'll do whatever it is like just please point me an erection tell me what to do I'm I'm begging you I really this I want to make this my life's work I didn't get a response.

Nothing. No response. And, you know, I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment from that. My new friend, Glenn Chachari, actually helped me through some of this, this anger towards Brett Victor, actually, for not responding. I process it, and it's no longer anger. And it's not even disappointment. I mean, it's, you know, I see, you know,. I see that there is this, I quote, gap in the market.

There's an opportunity here. Brett Victor is so great. He's done so much for me and the world. And I want to continue that work. And I think I also want to do that one thing that he didn't. Respond to the kids that are asking for direction or asking for it to work on and really help them connect them to others answer their questions mentor them connect them you know to a

community of people who can help them build what needs to be built to create the world that we care about you know I I really think there's an opportunity for me here to to really you really leverage myself through you guys. You guys are my users, my customers. You guys are the people that I want to help change the world. You guys are going to get all the credit. I'm going to be the person that nobody's going to have heard of. You guys are going to be the famous ones.

You guys are going to be the Steve Jobs. I'm'm gonna be the Alan Kay which obviously it's also very arrogant thing to say but but that's that's how I'd like it to be I'd like I'd like you know people say oh you know all the ideas that you know this famous person you I don't know your name but whoever did the thing now you know you know you know where he got a lot of his ideas. You know, he he stumbled into this this podcast that this guy Steve wrote, just just like how Steve Jobs stumbled into Alan Kay's lab all those years ago. That would be my dream. And I, I appreciate you listening to it because you listening is helping me get there.

And now that I've made it more explicit in my own mind and now out loud on this podcast that my goal is to leverage you guys, I'm desperate for you guys to reach out and tell me how I can do a better job. All ideas are welcome. My life's mission is to empower you guys, at least for the next foreseeable future. So please reach out if there's anything I can do. Even if it doesn't sound like it's something that I can help with, let me know.

Because if enough people reach out and say, you know, what I really need help with is X or Y, I'll figure it out. That's my job to help you guys. So whatever it is, if it's funding, if it's connections, if you're looking for a co-founder, if you're looking for direction in life like I was looking, if you're looking for a particular expert that you need help with, whatever it is, reach out to me, and I will either answer your question directly or I will connect you to someone who I think can.

And I hope over time to make this a more peer-to-peer model, more of a community. So instead of all the requests coming to me directly and then me having to route you, you can ask your questions directly to the community and the community will help you. And if nobody in the community steps up, then I'll step up and provide the best help that I can. All righty. So let's talk about the next steps. Now that I've got my goal partially

articulated and my strategy partially thought out, what are the next steps? So I want to finish writing my future of coding plan. The outline is currently at futureofcoding.org slash plan. And I think it will take me at least a few days, maybe this whole week, maybe parts of or all of next week to finish that up. So I'm going to finish it up and publish it on my Facebook and also on Twitter. Step two is making this project sustainable. I can already feel myself worried about how much money I'm spending at the grocery store

and other financial things like that. I don't think it's a good thing for me to be spending all of my time worrying about money. Now that I've quit my last company, The Coding Space, and I've stopped getting a salary from them, I need to find a way to make this work sustainable. I think where my head's at now is I'm going to talk to foundations, I'll talk to think tanks, I'll talk to companies who might want to sponsor me. Maybe I'll start a Patreon and see if you guys are interested in supporting my work.

And we'll see. I hope to have, you know, my costs are very, very low. I'm really in a privileged position. So I don't need, you know, if I can make $2,000 a month from this work, I really could do it indefinitely. $2,000 a month would be the minimum. You know, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. month from this work, I really could do it indefinitely. $2,000 a month would be the minimum. $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. Oh my God, dream. If I could make that much money a month, it would be a dream.

But that doesn't have to happen overnight. If in the next six months I could be making $2,000 a month in a sustainable way, I would be in heaven because I could literally do this indefinitely. And if I could get it from you guys directly, that would be proof that what I could literally do this indefinitely. And if I could get it from you guys directly, you know, that would be proof that what I was doing was valuable to you. Oh, it would be such a dream. So I'll probably end up starting a Patreon because I think that'd be good feedback for me to see if this work is valuable to you.

But I'll also reach out to companies and, and, and, and bigger organizations because I think that's where a lot of capital is. And, um, you know, you know, people have millions of dollars and they're trying to make the world a better place. And if I need $2,000 a month times 12 months a year, if I'm asking for 24k a year to produce for me to work full time on making the world a better place, taking no equity, I think that could be a compelling use of $24,000 for some sort of institution somewhere. So that's my second step. And if you have ideas there, please, please reach out to me and on my behalf. I really appreciate that. Okay, step three. Once I've got my plan in place and my funding source lined up,

step three is putting a bow, quote, a bow on my work with the coding space and Wolf.js. What that means to me is I've spent the last three years, maybe even more, maybe the last four years, thinking very deliberately, spending a lot of my time thinking about learning and teaching and what coding is and how to teach it. I've also built this platform with JS. And I want to do all of that work justice. I think at a minimum, that looks like four long form essays. I don't think I've ever written an essay that I'm... Maybe I've written one or two essays that I'm proud of in the way that, and like the level of quality that learnable programming is an essay. I've approached that quality, but I haven't quite hit that quality.

And I think with each of these essays, I really want to hit that quality. Maybe take like a week, maybe take like a month for each one, or maybe a few weeks for each one. I want to write four amazing essays. And so they're each for a different audience with a different problem. So the first one is, I have an app idea. So I'm constantly approached by people who have app ideas. And what they think they need is my technology advice. But what they actually need is my lean startup advice. And so I have the outline of that one mostly written. I wrote it in the shower this morning on my waterproof notepad. The second one is I want to learn to code. I'm constantly approached by people

who want to learn to code. And there are a few reasons why they might want to learn to code. And depending on their reasons, I have different advice for them. And this needs to be condensed into a post. My third one is I want someone else to learn to code. This is, you know, you're either a teacher or a parent or some sort of do-gooder. You want someone else to learn to code and you want to know what languages they should learn, yada yada. Also, it's really important why you want them to learn to code. Is it because you want to help them get a job? You want to expand their brain? You want to help them get into college? It's really important that I understand what it is that you want. So I'll have different sections of the essay depending on what your motivations are.

And then the fourth essay is I want to make more diverse. I want to make tech, the tech industry, the high tech, Silicon Valley tech industry, tech and startups and venture more diverse and inclusive. I know that as a white privileged man, you might not think that I have any interesting things to say here. And I don't have that much interesting things to say, but I do have a few things. We've done a pretty good job of the coding space.

Not thanks to me, thanks to my co-founder, Nicole Kellner, of starting this program called the Girl Code Program, which is the sole reason why our program is 50-50 men and women, boys and girls. So it's a pretty unheard of ratio in a coding after school program. So we figured a few things out and I thought we might as well share those insights with the broader community. Hopefully I can convince Nicole to co-author that piece with me and actually maybe go to a conference and deliver it with me as well because I think together we would be a good team for that particular piece. Okay, so that's step three and then step four after i've written a plan made it sustainable with a funny source put a bow in my work with the coding space and wolf js step four is follow my future of coding plan which um i haven't written yet so i don't know what that looked

like but it will probably be uh something along the lines of figuring it out what is the most important you know prioritizing what are the most important topics for me to research and write about and then research and write about them and then communicate them more broadly with you guys I you know I think my podcast the format is pretty good for now but I'll keep involving it as things continue. I think mostly I'll be a writer. You know, maybe I like to spend 20% of my time writing, like 20% of my time doing research in, you know, in the course of writing an article, and maybe 20% of my time doing the podcast, or maybe 10% of my time doing the podcast or maybe 10% of my time doing the podcast and then maybe 10% of my time engaging with y'all on Twitter and then another

like 20% of my time engaging with y'all in a community way, hosting events and engaging with you on online community platforms. I don't know if those percentages add up to 100% or less, but that's generally where my head's at. But that will all become more clear as I continue to articulate my plan at futureofcoding.org. You can follow it there,

or you can just wait for next week. Sorry, probably you'll get that plan will be articulated on this podcast in two weeks from today. Okay, other things to mention before I sign off. I am very excited about my new questionably ergonomic setup that I have rigged up. So as you may or may not know, I have struggled with chronic back pain over the years. And also hand pain. Actually, you know, I'm recognizing that it's my job to support you all in your work. I bet a non-insignificant percent of you have a repetitive stress injury. Many of you may call it carpal tunnel syndrome if you have it somewhere near your hands, but I think you will recognize once I help you see the light that it's not actually carpal

tunnel, it's repetitive stress injury. And I've tried a lot of different modalities. I've tried chiropractic, I've tried acupuncture, I've tried active isolated stretching, I've tried different stretching methodologies, I've tried chiropractic, I've tried acupuncture, I've tried active isolated stretching, I've tried different stretching methodologies, I've tried different massage techniques, I've tried physical therapy, I've tried a lot of different things, all to medium to no avail. And recently, I think I have nixed it finally, with this technique that has been around for 100 years called the Alexander Technique. So if it sounds like you, if you have pain in your body, particularly when you're coding,

which shouldn't be a thing. If you're programming, if you're typing, if you're sitting or standing or whatever it is and you're typing and you have pain and so much pain that you can't type, which is where I was at various points in my career my career which is super sad please reach out and I will that will give me the motivation to write a blog post about how I solved all these things with this new Alexander technique and also this new ergonomic setup I have at my bed I like it it so far, but the jury is still out. Basically, what I wanted was, I'm able to work standing up because I have a standing

desk. That was $400. I can also work sitting down because I have a chair and can just do that. I can take breaks. I set a timer every 45 minutes to walk around or stretch or whatever. I'll talk more about that in my post. But sometimes I'm tired or sometimes I just want to lie down and do work. And that's not really possible.

There is a station called the Alt Work Desk or the Alt Work Station. And it's almost 10 grand and it looks really futuristic and amazing and and with it you can either you can sit and stand and lie down or any combination thereof and it's beautiful maybe one day i'll get the money to buy that um but until then i was like damn it i really want to lie back in my bed look straight up you know just look at the ceiling like you know because i'm lying on my bed on my back flat. And then I have a keyboard on my lap and type. That to me seemed like a dream. And so, you know, in the past, I had my iPhone mounted on my bed with a gooseneck mount. And I would look up at the iPhone and type with my fingers, but that wasn't very ergonomic.

And so then I bought a, a, the same keyboard that I have for my computer, this Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. I bought the version that is compatible with the Surface Pro. It's compatible with Surface Pro via Bluetooth. So it's also compatible with my iPhone via Bluetooth. And that was neat. And so that convinced me to buy an iPad Pro, which was $ $600 and the gooseneck thing was like 20 bucks and the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard was 120 bucks so in total it's running me like you know and then the AppleCare on my iPad was like 100 bucks so all in all the setup cost me about a thousand dollars as opposed to the 10 grand so that the the alt workstation would have cost me so

you know still expensive still really expensive you know as compared to the uh the you know $300 setup i have for my well actually actually okay let's do the math so so that's a thousand dollars my standing desk is $400 my chromebook is. So that's, I think my standing desk was $450. So that's $500, $700. And then my keyboard and mouse is like another $100 or so. So okay, so my standing desk setup is about $100. Oh, and also the mat for that too. Okay, so I'm rounding up. But basically, my standing desk setup is $1,000. And now my lying down setup is also $1,000. So that's 2K of setups for $1,000 versus the Alt Workstation, which is about 10K, which is interesting.

But one of the positive things about my setups over the Alt Work setup is that they're much more mobile. The Alt Work setup, once it ships somewhere, my God, that sounds like a nightmare to move somewhere else. And being mobile is important. Like if you move to a different apartment or if you want to travel or whatever, be a nomad of some sorts, which many of you I assume are because you can be because your work is mostly at your computer. Anyways, I didn't realize I was going to talk so much about my new setup, but I realized that it might be important for a lot of you. I hope if it

wasn't, you skipped through the section. Anyways, I got my iPad set up. I'm actually right now lying in bed recording this audio on my iPhone microphone, my iPad microphone right now. I hope the quality is good enough for y'all. And yeah, so we'll see if I keep using this setup or if not. I don't want to be like my brother said, oh my goodness, you're like the characters in WALL-E. You're like riding around in an air bubble, like getting fat, sipping a Slurpee, you know, not moving. Okay, so I don't want to do that. I'll have to make sure that I still go on runs and go on walks and stuff. But this is comfy some of the time.

Okay, the last note before I sign off is that I've mentioned before that there's a Slack group that I started. In the past, you had to reach out to me and ask to be invited, but I've set it up now that you can just go to futureofcoding.org and click on a link that I have right there on the homepage at the top of the page and basically invite yourself to sign up for that Slack group. So, please join if you want to be more part of the community and you'll also get notifications of when we're having meetups in New York City there on the Slack group. Yeah, I think the jury's still out whether or not Slack is the right platform for this community. But that's what we got right now. And right now, it's mostly a New York-based group. But I'm collaborating with a few people who don't live

in New York about ways we can scale this. Maybe we could have in-person meetups in various cities around the world. Or I think probably more likely the next step would be to have a virtual meetup of some sorts maybe a Twitter chat, maybe a Google Hangout, maybe something else that I don't even know about. So if you have ideas there, please also reach out. Well, anyways, thanks for listening. I hope you get some value out of this. And as I've said multiple times, please reach out if you have any thoughts or even just encouragement.

Your words of encouragement mean so much to me. So please keep that coming. And I will speak with you all soon.