 So, as most of you heard, I'm David Plotts, I'm the editor of Slate, and I'm extremely delighted to welcome, fresh from Tim Geithner's office where she was learning things, Annie Lowry, who is a, what is your title, Annie, economics, economic policy reporter? I'm an economic policy reporter. Economic policy reporter for the New York Times. Annie is late of Slate, she was our money box columnist, she was our business and economics columnist for 2011, and she's just an incredibly brilliant writer and reporter, as any of you who've read her in Slate or in the Times knows. We're gonna talk today, it's slightly odd, because we're gonna talk about a story that Annie wrote for Slate that still has not been published, that we're gonna publish this week. The reason it hasn't been published is because Annie was really late getting it back to me. Let's be honest, Annie. Let's be true about this. So Annie, who literally worked, she got married and left Slate on the same day, and she literally worked until the day, like six hours before her wedding on all sorts of things, but the one thing she didn't quite finish was the story we're gonna talk about, which is gonna be up in Slate, and I'm gonna, it's gonna be, this is gonna serve as kind of a teaser for the story, which is a great story about learning to do things yourselves and about do-it-yourself culture, and so I really hope everybody gets a chance to look at the story, which I think we'll probably publish next week. So Annie, welcome. Thank you. I apologize to everybody for my blanket tardiness on all things, but... So the story that we're gonna publish is called Where's Why, and what is the story about? The story is about Slate gives all of its writers a month off to write one thing, which is, I can't even tell you how unusual it is among publications today that Slate gives its writers the opportunity to do this, so I decided to learn to computer program, just for the reason that I felt like I had a basic understanding of physics, I felt like I had a basic understanding of how the body works and planets, very, very superficial, of course, but the computer was magic. Nothing about the internet was magic, most things about telephones were magic also, but that's a different issue, and that felt kind of ridiculous. All I do is sit at a computer all day, and so I decided to learn computer programming, and there's a lot of things that you have to... The learning curve is really, really steep for programming, and I think it's the reason that a lot of us don't have the same sort of understanding of how computer programming works in the same way that we might. Your average educated person is gonna know a little bit about a lot of things, but generally not about computer programming, and that's because, despite the fact that programming languages are designed for the programmer to use, they're not actually what the computer speaks, there's a really steep learning curve, and so there's a lot of detail about me bumbling to get to learn it, and then the story is also about the computer language that I decided to learn is called Ruby, and it's a popular scripting language, a popular language used mostly for web apps, but one of its main... One of the people who I partially learned to program from who wrote one of the most famous Ruby tutorials disappeared two years ago, so I also went and tried to find him. So that's the second part of the story. So it's a story of a programmer named who goes only by the name of why, or why the lucky stiff. Yeah, it's W-H-Y. Who was a proselytizer to a community of... A community kind of of do-it-yourselfers, teaching people how to program and who one day decides he does not want to be... He doesn't want to be a person in the world or on the internet anymore and vanished, and so Annie is attempting to figure out what happened to him, where he went, why he disappeared, and in the process to learn Ruby, which she... So you had about a month to learn a programming language. In a month where you were probably doing other things, you were reporting and so forth as well, was that enough for you to become a master of this language or to have any skill that you could then apply in the world, or was it just enough to learn the equivalent of saying hello and thank you? So I think that probably I knew enough to know two things. So the first and the most important thing is you maybe learn enough to understand how complicated it is and how much programming there is out there and how brilliant some of it is. Maybe you can kind of start to understand how much work actually goes into these things and how difficult it can be and how amazing some of the things that computers now do are and also what computers are good at and what they're not good at and where you need people to direct computers. So that's one thing. And then what I could do by the end, I could write really simple programs. I could write little games and things and a lot of times, it's actually... One of the nice things is that once you've gotten the real basics of how to actually write a really, really short computer program, so even like a math problem can be a computer program, once you have the real absolute basics down, then there's like a lot of things that you can do kind of just really quickly and also you can go... Once you've kind of mastered that very beginning, you can go and there's a lot of program... There's actually a ton of stuff where people suggest little puzzles that you can figure out and programs that you can try and do. But no, I'm awful and I'm in awe of people who can actually do it and I think that that's one of the things I learned. So the subject of this conference that we're having is really it's about the maker movement, about do-it-yourself movement. If it takes a reasonably intelligent, if tardy woman cannot... That was enough. She's always on it. She's always at her deadline. But if a reasonably intelligent woman given a month to work on this can basically do a... You create a game that plays rock, paper, scissors, that's all you can do. What hope is there for average citizens, for at least in terms of learning software or learning that, what hope do we have that average citizens can get anything out of this or do something useful with it? Well, I think that there's probably kind of a liberal arts argument that it's probably good for everybody to know something about this given our reliance on it and given how important it is. And I think that to a certain extent you don't need to... I don't think that everybody needs to become a programmer and do that professionally, but I do think it's a sort of thing where it can help you understand problems that you're having, things that you're seeing, it can help you sort of be more open to the wonder of the things that are actually out there. And so in that sense, I think that it would be a good thing. I also think that just in terms of making your brain work, it's kind of like the Suzuki method. They say that the Suzuki method not only teaches you violin but makes you a little bit smarter. I think that if you taught kids computer programming, it'd be really, really good in just enforcing logical thinking and making them detail-oriented. And the other thing is you hear a lot about kids and people who are learning to program who... It's not so much that they're writing programs from scratch themselves, it's that they're going in and they're tinkering with things that are open source and sort of changing things to their needs. And I think that that can help foster a lot of creativity because programming is like anything else. It's like literature. It's highly derivative. Most of it is very derivative. Most computer programmers are taking big chunks of things that other people do. And so I think that you can actually be pretty creative in very small ways if you can just have a sense of maybe a goal that you have and maybe start thinking about how to get there. So looking at the... Out in the world, there's a big flurry this year of stories and reporting about Code Academy. And I think there's another... Isn't there another... There's a bunch of competing ones. So Code Academy is something where you, you, average person can learn to program sort of an online course over the course of a year, I think. And I probably, like some of you, I signed up. I had full intention of doing it, and then I've done none of it. But they still are counting me on their email. I wonder what you think... When we look back at the end of this year, and if you assume some thousands of people have gone through Code Academy, what will the benefit to society be from that? Will it be economic or will it be something else? I mean, I don't think it'll necessarily be economic. I also think that you now have... Because technology is such an amazingly... It's a sector that's growing really quickly and is obviously really vital. I think that if you're a college kid, you probably want to work for Facebook or Google more than you want to work for any place else. So I do think that there's probably a lot of cultural alert getting people to program. But if you start making that easier... And Code Academy actually, I thought, was like, it's kind of tough. It takes a lot of time to kind of just get the real basics down. And so I think that if there are more options, especially for adults, there's really great stuff to teach programming to kids, but you kind of feel like an idiot sitting there with, like, treacherous blocks and, like, a cat and still messing up. But I think that it would be good if there was more ways for adults to do this. And so I think that Code Academy will get a lot better. When it first came out, there was only one language that you could learn to code in, and that was JavaScript, and they're now expanding it out, so that it'll be other languages like Python, and they're doing Ruby, too. And that'll be good as well. And so, yeah, I do think that if there's been some sort of sense that, you know, because programming-type jobs are going to be really, really important economically to the future, because there's, like, you know, you just really want to live in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and be around that energy, it's the sort of thing that I think that the next big step would be if school started teaching it, I didn't have to learn it in school when I was a kid. But if you had elementary schools being more focused to getting everybody the basics and doing it in a way that it was really easy, so it didn't seem hard, I think that that would be great. All right. We're going to have time for just one question here, and then, yes, in the classes. There's a mic, or you can scream. So I said, okay. And please say your name and who you are. Okay. Well, I'm Pam, and I'm a software engineer, and one of the things I was interested in was, well, one, you like briefly, so this article doesn't come out, but I mean, I code some in Ruby, and why is it really, so you should have shown the picture of the foxes, everyone should look up why is pointing a guide to Ruby with the foxes. You'll get it. I know it makes no sense now if you don't know what I'm talking about. But in terms of adults learning a program, there's a lot out there. And it's driving me a little nuts, like being on the instructor side of it, and teaching people, everyday people to program, especially librarians, artists, and hearing people say there aren't opportunities for a program, especially in the human space, like actual classes like PyStar, RailsBridge, there's tons of them. So I'm wondering, because you were kind of talking about your experience program, did you just learn online, did you use why's pointing guide? Yes, there's a lot about why's pointing guide in the piece. It's actually really, one thing that I talk about in the piece is that it's really hard to read, and I think anybody who knows something about programming here would probably agree with this, it's really hard to learn to program by reading about programming, it's like impossible, you don't absorb anything, it would be like trying to read a Spanish dictionary and then speak Spanish, but there's a lot of great, and more and more great interactive things, where they'll be like, okay, can you do this, and you do this, and if you don't do it, there's a ton of those, and I agree with you that, yeah, there's a ton, and I have to think that there's also a ton more options recently for getting folks to learn to code. I don't know what it was like 10 years ago, and I think that there's probably also a cultural sense that folks should make it as easy and as fun as possible and kind of remember that sometimes it can be a little bit difficult at the beginning, but realistically anybody can do it and should be able to do it. So you're right also that I think that, especially if you live in a city, where there's a lot of things online where people either tutor you, or there's online interactives, and Code Academy is just one of them, there's tons of them, yeah. Annie, thank you so much, and I can't wait to publish this piece. I hope everyone takes a look at it.