Hilary Mason

I certainly don't believe that bootcamps are a scam, I think that the _right_ bootcamp can provide a beginner with the foundation needed to succeed as an engineer-in-training. The way I see it, "being an engineer" is a life-long journey.

When you're starting to code the first few 100 hours tend to be the most difficult ones (since so much is new). This is where the support you get from a bootcamp is really helpful.

Also, "becoming an engineer" aside, I think that learning to code has many side benefits. One of them being that it helps clarify the way you think. In a recent blog post, Hilary Mason (from Bit.ly) articulated this very well:

"That you can apparently complete a three month Ruby bootcamp and get a job today is an artifact of a bizarre employment market, and likely unsustainable. But by dedicating three months to learning to think in a logical framework, you’ll also gain an ability that will open opportunities for you for the rest of your life." http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/learn-to-code-learn-to-think/

Full disclaiment: I'm the Marketing Engineer at http://www.thinkful.com (an online school that teaches beginners to code through mentorship and projects) and I was a Thinkful student before joining the team fulltime. Also, I was part of the last batch at https://www.hackerschool.com/ - an excelent program that could be compared to a bootcamp given it's duration and how intensive it is.

If you like the idea of this then you will also like this one. It goes a bit further, still on my todo list for interesting fun projects.

http://smarterware.org/6172/hilary-mason-how-to-replace-yourself-with-a-small-shell-script

Hillary Mason

Substitute yourself by some small scripts
Document classification

Just stumbled upon a YouTube clip of one of the best Ignite presentations I've seen, by Hilary
Mason, a computer scientist at Bit.ly. Mason wrote a series of scripts that auto-respond to email
with particular content, and auto-nag folks she's emailed but hasn't gotten a response from yet. Hit
the play button to hear more. She says once the code's fit for sharing she'll put it up on GitHub.
Cannot wait.

http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/ignitenyc-the-video/

It's a little amusing to observe Twitter being used as a sort of "transport layer" for services because of how easy it is for people to use it; a few decades ago, to interact with a service you would probably open a TCP connection to it and communicate in a service-specific protocol. Later, that was largely replaced by the ubiquitous HTTP "web API", and now we see services built on services like Twitter which are already using a HTTP-based API.

Earlier, someone tried doing similar things with another calculator:
http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/a-quick-twitter-bot-bc_l/

It's new. It's similar to what they already do. It isn't trivial like cat pictures or boring like databases. It's obviously going to be very important. It is believed to involve math. It can be about almost anything, including things people talk about at cocktail parties. Because it is new, it is not necessarily about anything in particular.

And it has been talked up for years by attractive, articulate, impressively credentialed and well to do people who seem to be getting everything they want out of life.

http://www.hilarymason.com/about/

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