So i'm starting a series of comics making the pseudo-mesh project easier to understand it's one of those things at once people get it they really support it
But it's hard to build an emotional connection if the ideas are too complex at first
But once people get it they love the complexity and it's really fun way to get people to understand how networks and Internet are in government and industry all interact
So if you could just get over that hump and make the stuff more accessible it be cool
I know that people have said it should be in JavaScript since there's so many programmers to do JavaScript in Oakland if there's anyway that we could make a few more JavaScript projects at bridge onto the Lua
That would be cool it wouldn't even have to be anything to do with networking I know you guys want to be open source code that's used in Greece Slovenia and South America but we could at least have marketing pages or even learning pages and JavaScript that link to the Lua
I'll just throw some more ideas up on the wall but I don't want to create more work for everyone but this time it is I hope it's up in the right direction because after the original Complexity is overcome people really love all the different directions and sophistication that come with the sudomesh project
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Hope we can get some nice notes wihh the second session
http://notconfusing.com/cyberwizard-institute-retrospective/
CYBERWIZARD INSTITUTE: RETROSPECTIVE
Cyber Wizard Institute
The Cyberwizard Institute (CWI) was a free programming school based out of Sudo Room, running for the month of January 2015. The proclamation that I saw on their website before I volunteered to teach there was:
The idea is to be an anti-bootcamp. Anyone can participate. It’s free. We’re going to try hard to have lecture notes, assignments, and lecture livestreams up online. It will be primarily self-directed, but with guidance from higher level wizards.
As a founding member of sudoroom since 2011, but suffering from a recent malaise in my hacktivism, this was the perfect project to reinvigorate my involvement. What most appealed to me was the idea of an anti-bootcamp, because I’ve wanted to make clear to world the distinction I care about between start-up culture and technology. I wanted to do something metaphorically akin to hijacking the stereo system at a $4-coffee-wifi-shack and making a public service announcement that the computers are not just fancy TVs, but programmable instruments of self-empowerment, which, in addition, can be used for non-commercial purposes.
Meeting Every Day
Without any formal advertising, each sudoer leading CWI was pleasantly surprised when 27 wizardlings showed up on the first day (14 women and 13 men from my count). When I remarked this to CWI’s originator @marinakukso, she responded that “when you offer a free programming class, with no experience required – people want that”.
I recall some apprehension when we introduced ourselves, and there was the occasional naïve posturing of people who claimed themselves as programmers with the phrase “I know HTML”. But the need to impress quickly disappeared as we sat down to struggle with them in installing Linux on the laptops they’d brought.
The next day I was nervous with anticipation to arrive at an empty room after all we had shown fresh minds was that computer programming was about inexplicable Ubuntu hurdles. Still, with only a slightly leaky attendance most wizards did come back for more. And we went right on with teaching them bash.
We continued to meet for 5 hours daily with lectures and hackerspace-esque hands-on floating help from higher level wizards, which we dubbed “social code”. Our rhythm was found quickly, and only half way through the month CWI was feeling so magical, it received coverage in the East Bay Express:
“Many coding bootcamps in the Bay Area charge tens of thousands of dollars in fees, which can be seen as restricting access to what has become essential for finding a job in technology, let alone moving up in Silicon Valley’s so-called “meritocracy.” Kukso explained that Cyber Wizard Institute’s mission is very much aligned with that of Sudo Room, which is to give everyday folks the opportunity to understand and create the technology in their lives. “For a lot people who consider themselves nontechnical,” Kukso said, “a lot things relating to technology or coding seem mystical or secret, our perspective is … everyone can learn these types of things.’
Pedagogical Questions
Yet towards the end, I started to question the effectiveness and importance of CWI. From the beginning as facilitators we quipped that “anti-bootcamp” reallly meant “bootcamp”. And the calendar began by reflecting that.
Day 1: Install Linux
Day 2: Unix and Bash
Day 3: vim
Day 4: HTML
Day 5: javascript
Day 6: Networking
Day 7: Node.js
Day 8: Git
etc…
Which is exactly the way that substack, Oakland’s pre-eminent “unix philosopher,” would have it. Yet, that was before the collaborative aspects took over and I began to try and think about how I would teach a less trained non-programmer version of myself what I know now. I mixed in:
(click to view the recorded lectures)
Day 1: Install Linux (I counted 5 Ubuntu installs)
Day 2: Turing Machines
Day 3: Emacs
Day 4: Python, (notes)
Day 5: Functional Programming
Day 6: Data Analysis
Day 7: SQL
Day 8: Map Reduce
Day 9: Algorithmic complexity
Day 10: Set Theory, (part 2)
Where substack was spreading his knowledge of artisinal web-buildery, I was attempting to proselytize a world of Mathematical elegance. At times I was worried this felt interfering and competitive to the wizards.
However the final projects did come to life, instigate solely from the intrinsic motivation of the new-wizards. On the last day arduino hacks and personal-itch websites really had materialized. After speaking to those who made it all the way through the month, they spoke of a brighter perspective than my own: perhaps we inadvertently succeeding at being an anti-bootcamp.
The Medium Was Always The Message
As another facilitator @Johnnyscript, at the ending Cyberpunk Masquerade Wizard Initiation Ceremony, said we showed them what it coding is actually like – many differently opinionated hackers running around without too much top-down organization. We delivered the essence of the hackerspace more accessibly than just happening upon a room of silent geeks staring down. Our package, despite being a bit dishevelled, did form a solid curriculum, although it was not refined as something that you might pay $17,000 for. Yet it also was not an altar for silicon-valley start-up-ism.
Taken together, we find a point that I am surprised that I missed. Whereas programming bootcamps are normally Cathedrals, as Eric Raymond might put it, we built a Bazaar.
Notconfusingly yours,
Your humble newb-druid.
Cyberwizard Institute II
“Will there be another Cyberwizard Institute?” many are asking. Likely, but it is as-yet unplanned because volunteer work is tiring. If you have the intitiative or want to hear about an inititiative, join our discussion tracker on github.
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I got through some node.js lessons today on treehouse, it was awesome.
definitely check out the chaulkers videos, they are nice, I should have
been doing other stuff!!! I have a coding interview sample to turn in. i
have to study for some more stuff.
i made a nice learning repo, and i will probably use it for tutorials at
SudoRoom and Women Who Code. it's nice to just get into node slowly for
easily accessible command line tools.
https://github.com/romyilano/late-night-node-sessions
before i left i made some late night art:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/miromi/19567991254/
I usually draw animals at sudoroom but for some reason I drew purple and
maroon dancing humans who are probably naked.
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Romy Ilano
romy(a)snowyla.com
http://sudoroom.github.io/donateNowSplashPage/https://github.com/sudoroom/donateNowSplashPage
it points to the sudohumans page.
Hi I overcame any issues I had with marketing and css / web design to make
a shell SudoRoom Donate Now splash page. It's sort of like Marketing but
not.
I grabbed a slideshow and you can modify it and use it...
I feel so dirty now that I used jQuery ;)
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Romy Ilano
romy(a)snowyla.com
I work well when learning in clean minimalist empty areas.
Do you think it'd be kosher to carve out a clean minimalist space in the Sudoroom ?
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*Financial Straits! :* We have $1031 in the bank. Our minimum expenses are
~$2400 per month and as of July 2015 we are making $1820 per month through
stripe and gratipay. That means we have 1.78 months until we run out of
cash. Donate now! <https://sudoroom.org/donate/>
my to do: make a comic about this. there will be humans
i don't think it's very clear to outsiders how important the gittip was to
us, and all the internas and how hard we are working on sudohumans.
=============================
Romy Ilano
romy(a)snowyla.com
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Javascript
Last night I dropped by the SudoRoom JavaScript meetup.
- *mental state:* I was honestly extremely fatigued, as I have been
skipping a few hours of sleep in the past few weeks. Each hour shaved off
my sleeping schedule seemed like a tiny thing
I was really tired, so I was unable to socialize much with everyone.
Despite that it was cool just being around other people who were learning
and hacking. I was actually trying to get other work done too, and I don't
have time to go deep into javascript.
But being around the community at SudoRoom and knowing that *Oakland is
javascript cit*y <https://oaklandwiki.org/javascript> got me over my
"issues" with JavaScript.
I chatted with people, continue to be unable to get some components of
sudo-humans installed since I have a mac. (it's the canvas installation and
node gyp rebuild that's hitting me)
I'll try to get back to that later and help out.
So I just went through a tutorial while brushing up on javascript with
online learning. I've worked with node.js before, and it's a little hard
for javascript beginners to get into since it's so involved but with a
little practice I'm able to work it.
I've started using node.js for simple scripting jobs. I mostly work as an
iPhone programmer but it's nice to be able to do scripts in python and
node.js to do busy work.
I went over this tutorial, so this is the rough equivalent to a ruby on
rails app:
http://cwbuecheler.com/web/tutorials/2013/node-express-mongo/
it's nice having had the web background in ruby on rails through the rails
bridge outreach program. they're the people who first got me using git and
github and heroic several years ago before I decided to focus and learn
programming. I'm not a rails person but it's something I'd like to get
under my belt.
I don't claim to know everything but i was able to get a rudimentary mongo
db down with the tutorial's help
I learned how to push node.js out to heroku. When I first met substack and
Sudoroom i was at a hackathon and working on a node.js learning app for
kids. It was a cool hackathon and substack makes learning javascript and
node.js fun while throwing in a lot of art.
at that time I don't think heroku supported node.js so we were using
nodejitsu. but now it does, which i learned
result
so it doesn't look like much but i got to understand the inner workings of
node.js
express.js
and the various frameworks. I'm not saying that it's healthy to dive into
the frameworks first without knowing the language fundamentals (or
relearning them after you've forgotten them) but I'm also actively
reviewing stuff like inheritance, modeling objects in javascript and so on
on the free access to the treehouse learning site that i get through my
publicly funded san francisco library card.
http://arcane-savannah-2963.herokuapp.com/helloworld
i wasn't able to understand hooking up the app to the free mongodb database
on heroku. that probably isn't hard but id din't want to spend the rest of
the night looking around. it was nice and quick.
http://arcane-savannah-2963.herokuapp.com/userlist
i'm trying to focus but it's hard, so now i feel i've gotten past my very
superficial reviews of node.js
now I'm around a lot of really talented people who do a lot of work in
node.js so I can ask around, and I'm capable enough now (I hope) to do a
lot of self-learning and not have to be dependent on too much coursework or
even a book.
one of the hardest things to deal with is how quickly the languages and
frameworks update.
i'm primarily a mobile phone developers who's self taught but i'd like to
do more web stuff and back end work, since I enjoy the speed that comes
with web development. it takes a little longer to do UI on the mobile
phone, and although UI is important it's a different nature and not as
vital on a website. (someone will probably argue with me)
so although this looks pathetic: it was nice
http://arcane-savannah-2963.herokuapp.com/
nice because I was around a lot of javascript people, I got over my fear of
node.js and javascript, and i'm on my way to making small web node.js hacks
that are useful for different things <3
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Romy Ilano
romy(a)snowyla.com
The cyber wizard institute starts tomorrow
Would a student a day be interested in blogging what they are learning ? It doesn't have to be long but it would highlight what's going on at Sudoroom in a positive way
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