If you havent heard of Khan Academy yet you should immediately get out that rock you are hiding under. No joke, Khan Academy is a big thing. Watch this TED talk to see how amazing is what Salman Khan is doing. I was really happy when I saw that John Resig of jQuery fame has joined their crew to help bringing this extraordinary mission to the next level. It is really extraordinary, especially for the times of today when everything is in profits and money. But it doesn’t matter only because of that.
I come from Serbia, country which is in kind of development. Last 20 years where not that good for us. Degradation of every part of society to the critical level happened during that time. People mostly without jobs, hope and will to go forward despite the fact that time passes by them fast. Yes, time passes by and developed world is changing even faster every day. And if you stand still for 20 years, you can imagine how far world goes in front of you. It goes so far that you, from your own point of view don’t understand any more all that modern development and trends.
So the big question for countries like Serbia is how do they catch up with the modern world. How do you learn things you have to know when you don’t have access to good and innovative education, have no great people to lead the country because they are all spread around the world. Well, there are options. And improving education of people is in the core of all of them. In this context Khan Academy really matters. Not as final solution but more as announcement of future where education is going to be much less institutionalized and much easier spread across the globe, especially in the countries which need this the most.
Internet has evolved to a point where it is becoming a platform for spreading something more than Facebook and Farmville. Recently I watched TED talk of Chris Anderson on how web video powers global innovation and I could not agree more. And Khan Academy proves this in practice on a high scale and is able to motivate thousands to join the train of global education improvement and to bring it to the higher level. This might lead to looking at the education in whole lot different ways than before and using peoples potential most efficiently to solve problems of underdeveloped communities. It brings some hope at least.
Currently I live in Switzerland, country blessed by the best standard in the world and really great performance in every aspect, from administration to education. One thing I see here is that people are not aware enough how others in the world live and when aware it is on the level of general empathy and not on the level of doing something with it. Paradoxically, countries like this can give the most to the world, not only by sharing money but experiences and knowledge about their success as well. Internet in this case might be a great leverage for small and great ones to influence world wide.
Considering all of this, I though I could be one among this army of good people to help on this idea. I’ll try to contribute on this topic as much as I can in my spare time and motivate others to do the same. Translating as much videos to Serbian would be one of primary goals and promoting the idea as well.
It was long time ago since I realized that every discussions about this or that technology falls into water without putting it in the context of the real-world problem. And, unfortunately, real world today doesn’t lack problems. What it lacks are people of good will to solve them, or at least good people lack organization and coordination in order to efficiently solve these problems. Random Hacks of Kindness project was started with idea to address this problem.
RHoK works by bringing together experts in development and volunteers with a broad set of skills in software development and design to solve problems defined by NGOs and other institutions which work in the area of disaster management.
Last weekend RHoK happend for the first time in Switzerland. Frank, driven by his experience from RHoK #2 in Berlin, organized great event in Basel and gathered around 20 of us to attack some of the RHoK problem definitions we found interesting. On the following video you can see presentations of all the teams, their problem definitions and explanations of solutions.
I worked with Max, Phillip, Felix, Thomas and Chad from SecondMuse on the problem defined by Caritas Switzerland. Overall idea was to gather different sources of scientific GIS data for different global community risk related information like percentage of child hunger per country or intensity of cyclones in coastal areas and to present this information in usable way on one map with some tools to examine data more deep. Technically, the most difficult part of the problem is the fact that, as far I could understand, GIS area lacks standardization of data exchange file formats, and getting head around this domain in 2 days is really hard. We did not finish much on the practical side, but we examined the problem from technical side and came to deeper understanding of the problem domain and some ideas how it can be solved properly in future. One visible thing we made is half-working prototype of Google Map with two custom tile layers, more like proof of concept for our idea.
Beside great time, meeting great people and working on challenging problem I found that participating to this event additionally boosted my motivation to get deeper into non-technical side of problems of communities around the world. Also I became more aware how important is to motivate people to put some effort into solving this kind of problems and how easy is to help if proper environment is set and some basic organization is provided.
On the line of organization, I liked that we could give the input about how we could improve the event organization for future. I found couple of possible optimizations of the process which might help me achieve better results next time:
As software developer I’m sensitive to quality of requirements. Problem definitions, as given today, are definitely not the best to work with. If we could involve engineers in the problem definition process before problem definition comes for implementation it might help to get more done during the short and intense 2 days of hacking. And even more important maybe is to have the problem owner present in place for all time during the event. This not only helps team but even more helps them to understand the problem better for future.
The way teams are formed is not the most efficient. Although, getting together with group of completely unfamiliar people is personally great and can lead to lot of innovation, it makes continuity a bit harder. Working with people you know and trust is from other side more efficient but can lead to not that innovative approaches. If these could be combined in a way I’m sure we could achieve better results and insure better continuity which is essential for finishing the project to some usable state. Therefore I’ll try to make effort to form a team for next RHoK and try to stick to a problem until it is finished at least in the basic version.
Event should be promoted to the broader audience and involve more different professions like designers, usability experts, product owners, scrum masters and other involved in agile software development which is I believe the most appropriate for this way of attacking problems.
In future whole RHoK idea should be expanded to involve problem areas other than disaster management. I would personally be the most interested in problems related to online education of countries in development, and others certainly have their own preferences as well. This way we might gather much bigger community around it.
Every first Tuesday of a month, Zürich oriented web community gather for an evening of tech talks and some beer for, so called, webtuesday. Yesterday, we had pleasure to host event at local.ch for the first time as unofficial opening for the community after movement to new offices. As Harry tweeted already during the event, it was pretty packed. I was personally happy to see lot of people coming since this was only my second webtuesday since I started working for local.ch 6 months ago.
Packed webtuesday @localch offices (by Harry Fuecks)
This time Patrice and Chris from memonic.com gave great talk on the current state of the architecture and tools that are behind their startup. Since both of them worked for local.ch before (Patrice as Lead of Frontend Development, Chris as backend Java developer) it was interesting to see how much they kept and where they improved along the way.
Interesting point was the choice of the language for their startup. At local.ch, we are kind of separated on frontend and backend development, before all, by the languages we use. Shortly, PHP on the frontend and Java in backend with HTTP communication in between, XML result got from backend parsed by XSL to produce HTML. At Memonic they decided to bring that together and make gap between backend and frontend development smaller by choosing Python as common language. Having experience with the Scrum and challenges which this kind of separation between frontend and backend carries, I see this as reasonable decision. I was surprised to hear that none of them had professional experience with Python before founding Memonic.
Their architecture is highly web service oriented. The way Patrice conceptually sees the architecture can be paraphrased like this:
“I see web services in our architecture as classes are used traditionally, or maybe better, as components of the traditional framework”
end of lousy paraphrase . So, if we take Zend Framework for example: imagine that instead of having Zend_Auth, Zend_Session, Zend_Log, Zend_Mail … and sending messages to their objects, you have web services that expose interfaces over HTTP. On the slides Patrice provided can be seen in smaller detail way their architecture is broken into smallest possible web services that communicate among each other. Web services are based on wsgiservice (Python WSGI framework to create REST web service) library that is open sourced by Patrice. One thing I was interested is what is the performance loss in HTTP communication overhead between components. In current state of the load they do not see it as problem and they see using HTTP features as e.g. caching more valuable than performance loss introduced.
. So, if we take Zend Framework for example: imagine that instead of having Zend_Auth, Zend_Session, Zend_Log, Zend_Mail … and sending messages to their objects, you have web services that expose interfaces over HTTP. On the