Peter Christensen

Thoughts on Choosing a College

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A friend asked for advice for her son on how to choose which college to attend. Here’s my $0.02. (Note: Most of my examples are technical-related, because that’s what I know.)

The things you get from college are, from most to least important: certification, connections, and education.

Certification – many jobs in many fields require a college degree. Period. It’s proof to a hiring manager that you can follow directions for a long period of time. Without a degree, the burden of proof is on you.

Connections – at college, you meet peers, work with professors, and connect with alumni. These can be valuable connections, but only if you use them. The value of this is very school- and career-specific. For instance, every Supreme Court Justice went to either Harvard or Yale. Stanford is deeply tied to the tech entrepreneurship community, USC to filmmaking, CalTech to NASA, etc. If you know you want to enter a career that’s tightly coupled to one school, then it can be worth the cost to go there. Also, if you want to live in a certain region, then attending a big state school there gives you lots of general connections – eg if you go to Ohio State and stay in Ohio, you’ll have a connection to lots of people across society there. This goes double for careers with state certification like law and teaching.

Lastly, education. Once you’re in a decent enough school, the level of education is largely a product of what bar you set for yourself and how hard you work to achieve it. Many of the best programmers are self taught because they put in time way beyond what school would require. Top athletes, artists, etc go way beyond what you need for an A. This is available to anyone with an internet connection.

My advice to a future college student would be: if you absolutely know you want to work in a field strongly affiliated with a certain university, by all means go there and consider the cost an investment. Otherwise, if you’re going to a less specific field or don’t know what you want to do, go to the least expensive Division 1 college in the region you want to live in and spend as little money as possible until you know what you want to do. Then, use your courses as a starting point to learn as much as you can and produce as much demonstrable work as possible. Your work and knowledge aren’t limited by where you go to school, but your career choices can be limited by how much you spent on school.

Learning Foreign Languages with Fluent Forever

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I’ve followed Tim Ferriss since the first release of The Four Hour Work Week. He’s taken his share of criticism, and his huge success has given him a bit of an excessive reputation, but he is world class at showing how to break down a problem and create a process to solve it. His material goes into depth, so reading his new blog posts or podcast episodes is often too much at that moment. But when you encounter that problem, his resources are some of the best to go to when getting started.

Tim is big into travel and foreign languages, and he has had three long posts about learning a new language, two of which were guest posts by language learning experts. I skimmed all three and decided to dive into the process by Gabriel Wyner of Fluent Forever, in the article “How to Learn Any Language In Record Time and Never Forget It”. It ended up being 20+ pages printed, along with a feast of links to Gabe’s other writing and materials.

Here’s a one page summary of his main points:

To really learn a word in a foreign language, you need to build connections to all parts of that word – spelling, sound, meaning, and personal connection.

First, learn the sounds (1-3 weeks):

  • Study the specific sounds that are new or different in the target language – he has compiled these “Pronunciation Trainer” lists and sells them for a reasonable price, and he tells you how you can make your own
  • Practice hearing, pronouncing, and spelling the sounds

Second, learn a set of common words using pictures (1-2 months)

  • Common words are used more often, so learning them has disproportionate benefit
  • Google search for images using the foreign word, not your native translation, so you can learn the subtle differences in meaning
  • Making your own cards with images you found is part of the learning process

Third, learn grammar and abstract words (2-3 months)

  • Grammar is easy when you have a strong vocabulary
  • Learn grammatical forms using example sentences
  • You can get translated sentences from Google Images, by finding the original captions
  • You can have your own sentences translated at sites like Lang-8

After that, you pursue fluency in the way that works for you:

  • YouTube has lots of video of long-running TV programs in many languages. The familiarity of character and voices make them easier than news or movies
  • Books you know or about topics you’re familiar with are more likely to engage you and get you to actually study – in one of Tim’s other language blog posts, he wrote about how much Japanese he learned from a judo textbook
  • For speaking, you can find tutors on Craigslist, foreign language Meetup groups, or find people to talk with on sites like iTalki.com.

Gabe’s article was a wealth of information, and if my summary is useful, you should read his whole long post. For ~$50 you can get his pronunciation trainers and word lists, and the Anki mobile app. He’s also making his own app that looks to incorporate his training methods and materials, but it’s still in beta/pre-order as of September 2018.

I’m going to add the Fluency Forever methods to my daily use of the Hello Chinese app. I will report on my progress.

Resources:

Kia-Fu Lee, AI, and Sinophilia

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I’m a heavy consumer of media. I called it learning, but even if it was tech stuff or business stuff or whatever, I realized that because I wasn’t writing anything down or changing anything about my life or career, it was the equivalent of watching TV, just with a browser history. So my two content goals now are:

  1. Focus on reading/watching things worth taking notes on, and
  2. Summarizing and publishing those notes.

Like many Americans, I’ve been aware of China’s growth my whole life, from the little gold stickers on my toys, to their manufacturing rise, to crazy GDP numbers, the Great Firewall, etc. And like many Americans, I always assumed that no matter how successful China was, it wouldn’t threaten America’s pre-eminent position in the world order. But this year, China has been seeping into pop culture and technology, arguably the two industries most dominated by America. In movies, I noticed Chinese companies providing financing, movies like World of Warcraft that were made partly because of the interest of Chinese audiences, and noble, heroic Chinese characters in movies like The Martian, Pacific Rim 2, The Meg, and more. Watching Crazy Rich Asians topped it off – seeing a whole movie where every character was better looking, richer, smarter (ok, maybe not Bernard) and more successful than even American movie characters, flipped a switch in my head. China wasn’t an abstract concept – it’s a real place full of real people, as diverse and alive as America. That, overnight, flipped my interest in Chinese culture and it got me looking.

Over this same timeframe, multiple sources referenced Kai-Fu Lee, the Chinese AI researcher and venture capitalist. I briefly encountered his work years ago when I hobby-level explored speech recognition. I found his TED talk, and I find them to be a useful introduction to a person’s work. He’s unapolagetic about how hard Chinese entrepreneurs work and how in the field of AI, America retains the advantage for research and discovery, while China has the advantage in implementation and business. I’d heard bits of this sentiment, but they lacked the clarity and authority that Lee presented. He also showed the transition that work will take post-AI, from manual and repetitive to personable (social work, teacher, etc) and creative (research, marketing, arts, leadership, etc). It’s still a huge transition, but hopeful.

Since I’m super impressionable to things once I let myself be convinced, I have decided to double down on my work learning machine learning, deep learning, and AI, and to begin learning Chinese. There are so many resources, apps, courses, that this is something limited by my time effort, not availability or resources. We’ll see how it goes.

UI Beyond the Browser

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I recently presented a talk at HTML5DevConf called “Robots, Circuits, and Drones, Oh My! Javascript for Makers“. It took a slight change from the proposed title, to “UI Beyond the Browser – Software for Hardware Projects”. It’s an evolution of the talk I gave at SpainJS about the exciting changes taking place in hardware development and ways that software developers can dive in and enjoy the fun. I think it was recorded but the videos haven’t been posted yet. I’ll update this page when they are. Video below!

I hope this is helpful to you! Special thanks to everyone that has helped me on my Maker journey so far – Jeff McAlvay and the Tempo Automation team, the OpenROVs, the Upverters, Lady Ada, Parrot for making the awesome AR Drone, Orbotix for making the delightfully magical Sphero, and more. Very special thanks to the organizers of HTML5DevConf for inviting me to speak!

Download presentation (21MB pdf)

If you’d like to have me present this or similar topic at your event, please email me.

Now go, goof around, make something awesome!

Programming The Real World – Presentation Slides

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I recently presented a talk at the Spain.js conference and I spent a long time (a long, long time) making my slides.  Then I realized that while it was a good slide deck for the presentation, it was nearly useless without me accompanying it.  Since the talk was not recorded :(, I reworked the slides completely to serve as a standalone deck.

I hope this is helpful to you! Special thanks to everyone that has helped me on my Maker journey so far – Jeff McAlvay, the OpenROVs, the Upverters, Lady Ada, and more.  Super thanks to the organizers of Spain.js for inviting me to speak and to Manilla for sponsoring my travel.

Download Presentation (17MB pdf)

If you’d like to have me present this or similar topic at your event, please email me

What did people think of the talk?

 

 

 

Enjoy, and go make something!

How To Teach Yourself Programming

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This didn’t come through my new web-crush Mentii, but it is another bit of advice that I thought deserved to go farther than one email. This is a friend that lives near a tech center and wants to learn programming, but has no background or experience other than normal computer usage.  I looked at some of the university programs near him and gave my recommendations, but that’s not widely relevant.  The important part was:

tl;dr: YOU HAVE TO TEACH YOURSELF PROGRAMMING

The full version was this:

I highly, highly recommend doing a lot of programming on your own.

First, the programming requirements for college aren’t a perfect match with what you need for a job, and there are not enough intense programming courses to get you fully proficient.  You wouldn’t expect to get in shape if you only took P.E. classes, would you?

Second, some people just don’t enjoy or “get” programming – it’s a specific way of thinking that some people take to naturally, lots can learn, and some people truly do not enjoy it. Doing your own will make school easier, prepare you better for work, and let you know really quickly if programming is not for you.

There are many, many sub-fields within programming, but for beginners, I would recommend choosing one of these 2 paths:

  • Web programming – server-side languages, HTML, Javascript, CSS.  This is probably the skillset that currently has the lowest bar for getting a full-time job.  There’s an infinite amount of knowledge above those 4 components, but you can learn enough of these in 6 months to contribute to a web development team.
  • “Maker” programming – Arduino, Javascript, electronics, robotics.  Smart devices are just now hitting the early adopter phase (Pebble watch, Nest thermostat, lost of stuff on Kickstarter) but there are tens of thousands of products that need to be reinvented with network connectivity and inexpensive microprocessors, and probably thousands more products that haven’t been imagined yet (this smart fork is probably my favorite).  In 3-5 years, I think an interdisciplinary electronics+code prototyping skillset will be the next big class of technical skills, alongside web, mobile apps, and desktop software.

I know much, much less about Maker programming than web programming, so I’ll withhold my advice there. For teaching yourself web programming, I recommend the following resources:

  • Learn Python the Hard Way (free online) – Python is a simple but powerful language. It’s probably the language that looks the most like the process it describes. It’s also used heavily by Google and NASA, as well as being the most prominent language for science and math. This book assumes no previous programming knowledge and only basic computer usage. It’s 52 lessons going from printing text to a screen, all the way to storing data collected from a web page. It’s a very, very solid and broad introduction to programming.
  • Codecademy (free online) – this is a series of online lessons and exercises. This is probably narrower than LPTHW but includes interactive elements and has lessons for more technologies (LPTHW only uses Python but covers a wider range of programming topics)
  • Try Ruby (free online) – a short (~15 min) online interactive tutorial to learn the Ruby programming language (that’s what I use and lots of web companies use)
  • Rails for Zombies (free online) – a series of interactive lessons to learn Rails, a set of tools in the Ruby language that makes it fast to build web sites. These are aimed at beginners and released by the same people that make Try Ruby
  • Rails Tutorial (free online) – an intermediate set of lessons about building websites using Ruby and Rails. It assumes more programming familiarity so it’s not great to start with but if you finish RFZ you’re probably ready for it. It covers more advanced coding practices, web site principles, and more. Very, very thorough.
  • Code School (paid ~$25 courses online) – a collection of high quality courses with video and interactive lessons covering a variety of web technologies.

I have dabbled or perused most of these but I’ve been programming for 20 years and professionally for almost 10, so I’m not the target audience.  I have heard good things about them and they all come from sources I trust and respect.

The most successful programmers I know are the ones that are the most prolific – they write a lot of code, of different types, to solve different problems, because that’s the way you learn.  And the more you learn, the better equipped you are to solve the next problem you face.  So no matter what you use to learn, you should program a lot.  University CS programs have some intensive programming courses, but it’s too small a percentage of the time you spend learning.  You have to supplement it yourself.

Mentoring Made Easy

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I came across a new site that has completely captivated me: Mentii.  It’s a matchmaking site for people looking for mentors and people willing to be mentors.

The signup process was simple – you can import your profile from LinkedIn, you can import your contacts (I always skip this step), and write a statement of what kind of mentoring you can provide.  The next screen is a list of people that have recently asked for advice.

I feel great about my career now, but I made some uninformed choices earlier in my career that cost me a lot of time and money.  If I had a trusted mentor when I was at those junction points in my life, I might have ended up where I am much earlier.  So giving me the opportunity to be that helpful person for others is irresistible to me.

I contacted a few people still in school who were in situations I could help with.  It felt great!!!  Thank you to the Mentii team for creating such a rewarding service.

Here are two emails I sent, with the personal bits removed.  This is similar to earlier advice I wrote to a college sophomore and someone whose resume was misrepresenting them.

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When We Build – Notes and Quotes

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I just watched an inspiring video about what it means to be a designer today.  It’s called “When We Build” by Wilson Miner.

Wilson Miner – When We Build from Build on Vimeo.

It’s worth watching the video because the images, music, video, and his hypnotically powerful vocal pacing are outstanding.  But if you don’t have time now or you need more convincing, here are my notes.  Most of the quotes are word for word because he chose his words and ideas as carefully as he chose his media.

Wilson, thank you so much for this talk – I can’t even imagine how powerful it would be in person.

[1:00] Warning that it’s going to be a strange talk
I’ve been cynical about the potential of what we do – “It’s just a website, get over it”
This is a uniquely exciting time to be designing digital tools and products

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Review of AppSumo/Mixergy Course on Startup SEO

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Using SEO To Build Your Brand & Get More Customers

Background

Lately I am less and less satisfied with reading blogs or news sites – I’m leaning heavily towards content with immediate, actionable lessons. I joined Mixergy Premium (more on that another day) but hadn’t taken any of the courses. Since Noah Kagan is a better marketer than Andrew Warner, I ended up buying a Startup SEO course from AppSumo without even realizing that it the same course was already available to me through Mixergy Premium. AppSumo has a generous refund policy, but I have to give them credit for actually making the sale – the $25 I spent at AppSumo has greatly amplified the value I’m getting out of Mixergy Premium, now that I see how useful the courses are.

Rationale

For most of my career, my extracurricular learning has been about software development. That’s my job, right? Unfortunately, that left me with a narrow set of skills. I’m trying to fill those gaps strategically, trying to get the first 50% of knowledge of a topic extremely fast. AppSumo courses and Mixergy Premium are great for this – reputable, accomplished instructors, Andrew Warner’s guiding hand and high standards, and easy access to video and supporting materials. The SEO course gave me exactly what I hoped – before the course, SEO was a hazy concept that I was not confident about, and after it, I have a framework to choose and prioritize SEO actions going forward.

Insights

I took a whole bunch of notes, but more important is the summary:

SEO is about finding the terms you want to rank for, and getting strong inbound links for those terms.

The basic process is:

  1. Choose keywords based on high volume, low ranking difficulty, and high value to you
  2. Do basic, table-stakes optimizations – using search terms in titles and headers, putting alt text on images, helpful internal linking for crawlers and users, etc
  3. Use a mix of hustle and creativity to get links that will help you rank

The course goes into much more depth on all of those points, and I won’t spoil the secrets. If you want the details enough to sign up for Mixergy Premium or buy the course from AppSumo, then I just did you a big favor.

Recommendation: Buy!

Bonus: Why do I need SEOmoz’s help? I’m a reformed software developer who’s tired of seeing great software go nowhere because the developers don’t know how to market it. I believe that marketing is an engineering problem and from everything I’ve heard, SEOmoz has the best SEO tools in the business. Help me Rand!

Ripping And Encoding Streaming RM, or How I Defeated RealPlayer

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I’ve known (and written about) MIT’s OpenCourseWare project for a while but never gone through any of the courses. I’ve found the first one I want to work through on Data Wrangling’s outstanding Hidden Video Courses in Math, Science, and Engineering page. One of the courses in the Mathematics header is Godel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey, and I decided to bite.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

The book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is widely praised as being an important, mind-bending, eye-opening book, but the reviews I’ve seen generally fall have fallen into two categories:

  • people who have tried to read it but quit about 1/3 of the way through, but still proudly display it on their shelves as a badge of honor
  • b) people who have read it and understand it, but don’t feel like trying to explain it to the uninitiated.

Since the MIT OCW course was a summer lecture series for high school students, I figured I could keep up. And by watching the lectures first, I’m hoping the book will be easier when I get around to reading it. It doesn’t seem like a book where I should worry about spoiling the ending.

There was one problem that took me a while to overcome: the lectures were in streaming .rm (Real Media) format. That means RealPlayer. I am not friends with RealPlayer – I cut my ties with Real in 2002 and vowed never to have their software on any of my computers again. If you don’t understand my revulsion, just Google “real player sucks” (477,000 hits).

So after a few days of tinkering, I came up with this solution for ripping rm streams and encoding them in a different format (I chose .mp4 so I can watch them on computer or video iPod). It takes about 20-25 mintues per hour of media but can be setup up in batches to run overnight. In my opinion, that’s a small price to avoid dealing with RealPlayer.

[NOTE: This is for Windows XP. YMMV on other platforms]

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