Mentoring

One of the round table discussion at Des Moines Bar Camp was how to get students excited about our field. The discussion went from how to get students interested in non-coding aspects of software development like QA testing to finding the passionate students. One thing that I suggested was that we needed to mentor more. I think we need not only to mentor students, but people within in our industry.

Let's face it. There's no way to know everything about software development. I would even say it's impossible to know everything about Java (the number of frameworks and new ideas is overwhelming) which is a small part of the entire computing realm.

Getting back to mentoring students though. In the user groups that I attend, it's been rare to come across a student. We are they not coming? Could we be scaring them away? Are user groups too advanced? What?! I think it is none of those things. I just don't think we are marketing to them. How do we do that? I think simply putting up posters and targeting students is a start. Reaching out to teachers is another avenue. Embracing students who come to these meetings is also needed. We need to keep those passionate about what we excited.

Which leads me to that we need to mentor everyone. I've been blessed in my career to have several mentors and I try to be a mentor when asked as well. I want to give back to those that have given me so much. There's only so far that books can go. Experience is best handed down through mentorship. I think it also allows us to feel freedom to try out new things. As we move to move functional programming languages, wouldn't be nice to be mentored by the people with the most experience?

I would love to see our industry to move to an apprentice model. I think the caliber of developers, testers, and leaders would increase dramatically. We're an industry that is just starting to tap into networking (Bar Camps are excellent for this) and embrace sharing (open source). It's exciting times right now and I can see where everyone needs to be mentored. I'm always learning and love talking with people who have more experience in a technology. We need to keep the learning going.

I think the new social networking tools could be used to great effect for setting up these relationships. So, let's get together and start mentoring. Create the developers we would like to work with and be.

Bar Camps

In the past week, I've attended both the Omaha and Des Moines Bar Camps. At each, I gave my Seaside and advanced Javascript talks. The responses and turn out was incredible. Interest is growing in Seaside and Javascript is being viewed more as real language than a toy. It makes me a happy person. Everyone I met was passionate, articulate, and excited. I can honestly say that all of the Bar Camps I have attended thus far have been incredible. I've met many new friends and I can't wait to go to another. They are addicting! Hope to see everyone again! Check out my presentations page.

Update on Javascript

I've been meaning to write an update to my post on Javascript prototypes. Let me just show the updated code and then I'll explain what's changed.

Base = new Object();
Base.clone = function() {
 var creator = function() {
  this.constructor = arguments.callee
 };
 creator.prototype = this;
 var result = new creator();
 if (result.initialize)
  result.initialize.apply(result, arguments);
 return result;
}

Base.mixIn = function(properties) {
 for ( var each in properties)
  if (properties.hasOwnProperty(each))
   this[each] = properties[each];
 return this;
}

ZipCode = Base.clone().mixIn( {
 initialize : function(standard, extension) {
  this.standard = standard;
  this.extension = extension;
 },
 toString : function() {
  return this.standard + "-" + this.extension;
 }
});

print(ZipCode.clone('56777', '4567'));

First thing you will notice is that I got rid of Object.prototype. I'll admit all of my recent Javascript code has been scripting on the server side. I do sometimes forget about all of the legacy code running on the browser(Adding properties to the Object.prototype can cause bugs in naive for loops). Not to fear, I created a Base object and put the clone and mixIn functions on it.

The next change is to the clone function where I introduced code that will setup the new clone if an initalize function is present. It calls the initialize function with the arguments passed into the clone function. I love doing things like this with Javascript.

Lastly, I had mixIn return itself. The reason is so that I could put the clone and mixIn on one line and only name the prototype once. This means I'm not duplicating the names of my objects and can more easily refactor the names. It also makes it easy to see the name and what prototype it is inheriting from.

I've always been infatuated with prototype-based programming languages. Javascript makes it possible to play with a real life prototype-based language. It saddens me to know that the next release of the standard introduces classes and that so many frameworks force classes into it. Once you get into using prototypes, you don't want to go back. You can use prototypes for a primitive versioning system, change tracking, and more that I haven't thought of yet. If you find more, let me know. Have fun using Javascript in new excting ways.