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Erik Trautman

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
-- Pablo Picasso

Fat-Free Education

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The education system is pretty messed up. I don't think many people will argue with that. Tuition at my alma mater -- Penn -- rose this year to $39,088, not including the $12,368 for room and board (1). I'll admit that my eyes popped when I looked that up. Compare that with another stat, that only 60% of students were able to find full-time employment after graduating (2), which is *above average*. How the holy hell is this a legitimate situation? Of course, the value of a well-rounded liberal arts education goes well beyond the boundaries of such a narrow idea as getting paid enough to live and eat and...

A full on, 4-year liberal arts education is like a big fatty steak. It costs a lot, it tastes great, and it's of questionable nutritional value. And not everyone should be eating it. Why are we still telling people to pay over $200k for something with only a 60% probability of resulting in a job? Why do you so often hear "I only learned 10% of what I used on the job in school"? Some people will always eat steak but for the rest, we need a fat free education.

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Maximizing Your Bootcamp Experience

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*Note: It's been a long time since I wrote this and it's been a surprisingly popular post. Since then, I've founded the Viking Code School, an online software engineering program that takes exceptional aspiring developers and makes them job-ready. Our mission is meant to bring this level of education to people who cannot uproot their lives to attend an in-person program and I encourage you to check it out if this path interests you.*

I recently attended the inaugural Ruby on Rails bootcamp offered by App Academy and it was a hell of an experience. It's an undertaking that I highly recommend but one which takes a serious level of maturity and commitment to do right. Given that hundreds of other students will soon walk a similar path, I've put together the following recommendations to help you get the most out of your bootcamp experience. You may not be headed to the same program but I bet you'll find some of this useful to you anyway.

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The App Academy Student Journey

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*Note: It's been a long time since I wrote this and it's been a surprisingly popular post. Since then, I've founded the Viking Code School, an online software engineering program that takes exceptional aspiring developers and makes them job-ready. Our mission is meant to bring this level of education to people who cannot uproot their lives to attend an in-person program and I encourage you to check it out if this path interests you.*

I got into App Academy in late December and it's pretty much consumed my life ever since. The San Francisco-based program is a 9-week intensive dive into Ruby and Ruby on Rails designed to take people with little or no experience in computer programming and turn them into junior web developers. They are an offshoot of the original Dev Bootcamp, which began offering a similar style of classes about a year ago and has enjoyed great success.

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Startup Advice from Michael Hartl

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Friday at App Academy we had a surprise visit from Michael Hartl, author of the now-famous Ruby on Rails Tutorial. Interestingly, the conversation tracked a wide range of topics that leaned more to the entrepreneurial than the development side of things. Michael himself admitted that he's probably not the right person to ask many beginner questions to, since he has very little personal experience being a beginner or dealing directly with their issues.

Instead, we tried to get a better sense of the steps that led to the tutorial's creation and his advice for the day when we might put our newfound skills to use in startups of our own. Michael, after a narrow miss with a lifetime in academia, got into programming and landed in Y Combinator working on an open-source social network called Insoshi. As he put it, they just kind of pulled it together at the last minute to get something ready for Demo Day and it was surprisingly well received before the financial world ground to a halt in fall of 2008 and they couldn't secure funding to continue.

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How Harvard’s CS50 Renewed My Hope for Online Education

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This fall I took CS50: Intro to Computer Science at Harvard and it was refreshingly, thankfully good. I didn't take the course *at* Harvard per se, but rather via the edX online platform, which is a collaboration between MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and other major universities to put their courseware online. It's one of the primary vehicles through which top tier institutions are at last surging into the online education space in a kind of academic land grab like we've never seen before.

edX, Coursera,

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The Problem with Being M-Shaped

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There's a lot of noise these days about being "T-shaped." It's possessing that great blend of depth in a particular skill area with the ability to see the bigger picture and to work cross-disciplinarily. It's much better than being "lower-case-l-shaped", with depth but little versatility, or perhaps "apostrophe-shaped"... okay we're stretching it too far.

I am M-shaped. I see people all around me who have discovered their love for a particular field, be it database engineering or social media advertising or User Happiness Management, and they've spent years immersing themselves in the joy of it. I tried that in energy trading but never found my nirvana and left to build something real. I now find myself at a feast of 1000 dishes and, perhaps ill-advisedly, I've launched into it like a starving man possessed. Of the three major startup skills categories ["business", design, and development], I'm actively learning them all.

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The Apathy Implosion and Lessons in Leadership

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I recently had a team implode around me. As is often the case, it wasn't some external stress that did the job so much as a lack of passion and strong leadership. It was a slow death but it almost seemed inevitable.

To rewind a bit, I've been taking the Tech Entrepreneurship course through the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLab) online platform. It's a semester-based course where the students form small teams and build a plausible business plan, which is presented at the end of the course in January.

The first couple weeks were a frenzy of virtual team building, where the 30,000+ students that began networked and facebooked themselves into groups of 3-5. That was a fascinating experience in and of itself -- which approaches were destined to be successful? I saw cases of future founders championing their idea, seeking to rally some free labor to develop it. Then there were groups who bonded across continents because they shared a passion for solving a particular problem. Often, the easiest way to begin chunking the enormous initial set of students was by geography. The San Francisco locals Facebook group eventually swelled to over 30 people.

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San Francisco @ t=0

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My final week in Houston was hectic. I sold a truck, the motorcycle, and just about everything else that I possibly could in order to extend my personal runway for as long as possible but the high water mark has officially passed and the limit as t approaches infinity of $$$ = 0. I transitioned from road-tripping wanderer into the odd limbo of sleeping on a couch in the city where I used to live while preparing to move to a place where I had no apartment and no job waiting for me.

Compared to the 20,000 miles I recently spent on the motorcycle, our 2,000 mile jaunt to San Francisco in a moving truck was smooth and blissfully air conditioned. The logistics of moving into the new apartment in San Francisco (which we were fortunate to find quickly upon arrival) involved 4 separate and equally awful DIY legs but the job was done and the soreness will fade.

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Site News: Disqus for Commenting

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Greetings! I've finally done away with the bare-bones commenting interface I had out there before and replaced it with Disqus, something you've probably already seen in a hundred places across the web. The integration was very straightforward, basically just copy-pasting some javascript and tweaking some options. I hope you enjoy the added functionality and we really get the discussion going in the next few weeks.

Erik

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Beyond Version 1.0

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Despite all the forward progress I've made so far, there are plenty of other items on my to-do list. One of the hardest parts of this blog project was actually to say, "screw it, just launch" despite all the little things I hate and immediately want to change about it. I assume much of the site will look pretty different as the weeks progress and I begin adding features and tweaking design elements.

The next steps will involve things both on the front end and behind the scenes. What you won't see are my attempts to improve security and search engine optimization or to provide RSS compatibility. I'll also be deploying Google Analytics and looking into other options to try and regain some of the valuable analytics information that Wordpress had been providing.

On the front end, my next project is to put together a way of tracking progress during my trip (I'm in the midst of a 12,000 mile motorcycle journey through the CONUS). A lot of people have asked me how to follow along and so I will be building the ability to track that and integrate it with the rest of the blog (pictures and posts). I will also set up Disqus to power my comments and will implement various social sharing widgets. Stay tuned.

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