 Hi everyone, I'm Julie Levoix. I'm going to talk about the experience of going to Hacker School in New York City or how I spent my summer vacation in 2013. I'm going to speak in English. You're welcome to ask me questions in French. It's just my French is not that good. And also I just want to say as well I'm not a I don't get any kickbacks from anyone going to Hacker School. I don't represent Hacker School so if there's any mistakes it's not their fault. So what's Hacker School? Hacker School is basically three months program in New York. It's full time. It's free. Obviously living in New York is not free you might have heard. Hacker School describes itself as a writing retreat for programmers. The basic idea is not that there's not a curriculum. It's not like people tell you what to work on. It's not like a CS degree or a short term program. You really decide to yourself what do I care about learning as a programmer. How do I want to improve? And you go there and there's people there to help develop in the way that you care about. So it's like a very self-directed program. For myself and for other people that went through academia it's sort of how you wished your CS degree but wasn't. What Hacker School is not, it's not why Combinator. They make a really big deal of saying this. It's not a place to develop a product or company or like about startups. It's really specifically for I want to become a better programmer and this is who Hacker School is for. So if you can work on anything you want, what do people work on? For myself I already had a background in systems and CS theory and math and stuff like that. So what I really wanted was I wanted to really understand the web stack. I've done a bit of work in Rails before which is kind of a really plug and chug kind of machine. I felt like I was doing a lot of things that I kind of sort of understood but not really. So I really wanted to get closer to what's really going on. So for myself I mostly did projects with stuff like math, node, like things that are a little bit more, you have to do a little bit more yak shaving, a little bit more, you have to do your own thing. In my group, what other people worked on, they were reading groups in theoretical CS. There were people that took SPSR, like a famous textbook in theoretical computer science and basically just went through each chapter week by week together. There were people that like chose intro to programming MIT course and just like went through it together every week. There were talks by amazing programmers like Jessica McKellar which you'll probably see at PyCon, Melchua, Peter Norvig from Google Research. Some people wrote their own programming language. Some people wrote JavaScript games. There were workshops on how to contribute to open source if you've never been an open source contributor. Pretty much anything you could be interested in about how to improve as a programmer. There was someone doing it there and then if it wasn't there already you could say, well I'm starting a group about this, does anyone want to come? What makes Hacker School special? There's a lot of programs right now like Rails Bootcamp, the Flatiron School, these kind of three months, 12 week programs of some sort of like take non-developers, tournament developers or kind of things like that. What's so special about Hacker School? For myself, I would choose Hacker School in a heartbeat over any other of those programs. Particularly to me what made the difference was the people and how much effort they put into creating a positive social climate. It wasn't just a place where it's like, oh yeah, you're just going to learn some Rails now and then you can get out here and get a job doing Rails, but really to me they felt like they really made an effort to address what's kind of wrong with our weird programming culture and how to make that better. I'll talk a little bit more about it in a sec, but also in the sense of it's not like here's a 12 week program on how to learn Django, it's really like you decide what you work on. There's no teachers, there's facilitators that are more experienced programmers that are there to help you when you have questions or is this how I should be learning. One of them actually is Alison Capture, who's very active in the Python community, she's going to be talking about Python, she's a Hacker School facilitator for example. And then mentors are really experienced programmers, I guess often famous programmers that will come and work with you. Basically for a whole week there was Peter Norvig sitting there and you could be like, hey, do you want to code with me today? Peter Norvig, head of Google Research, he's going to be like, sure. To me, that doesn't happen to me, I don't know about you, but that doesn't happen to me every day. I thought that was really amazing about Hacker School. One of the things that was amazing about Hacker School and was part of creating the social climate, Hacker School has very specific social rules. These situations will be very familiar to you if you've been in tech for more than like five seconds. And so there's actually four, but I'm only going to talk about three. And so the most important, so rule number one was no fanging surprise. For example, you could say to me, Julie, you're a programmer, don't you know that indices are supposed to start at zero when you have a tech talk? I knew that in my mother's womb. Like if you've ever read Stack Overflow or Hacker News you're probably familiar with this kind of argument. And Hacker School is like, you know, let's stop with those comments. It's never the point to help the other person when you say something like that. Really you're just trying to make the other person appear ignorant and make yourself kind of one-up them and make yourself seem better. And that doesn't create a positive climate. It just makes people feel bad and there's no gain in the conversation. And then number two is no well-actualies. So for example, someone could say well, actually Julie, actually no, I said I was going to use my friend Louis as an example of things that are like well-actualies. He's my friend so I asked him before if I could pick on him. But his question before of like, well actually aren't you missing a parenthesis there? That's exactly this kind of question where like it's true. He's not saying something that's wrong, but does it really add to the discussion? Like is that the main point of what we're talking about? It's like not really, right? Thanks, Louis. And it's like, I'm sure he didn't mean it in a bad way and people rarely do like I say stuff like this as well, but if you get like 10, 15 people like that in a discussion, it's just like you can't even talk about the main thing anymore. You're just basically always talking about these little nitpicky things that don't really matter and it kind of really ends up detracting from having a real conversation. And so that was another rule of hacker school. And the other one, like a very important one is no sort of sexism elitism, racism, and just to generally foster like a climate of respect among students. And people honestly like these things so much that they said like, you know what, with my roommates, we decided to like implement this. We decided with my roommates we would have no well actuallys or we would we would have no oh, didn't you know, no finging surprise and like so people found it so positive that even outside of the context of oh, you're in hacker school and you have to do this, people voluntarily really thought that this was like adding to their social life. And so to continue with the idea of the climate of respect, I found what like with tech lately there's a lot of discussion like on Twitter and on the internet about why is tech so toxic? Like this whole like controversy lately around the code of conduct and what's happening at conferences and things like that. And I think, you know, people are starting to realize this and for example the Python community, I think there's a lot of effort that goes on to like the Python community a positive place where like a lot of people feel like they can belong. And one thing that I really realized from going to hacker school where there was so much effort put into like having a positive social environment was the toxic climate in tech is holding us back and not just as like human beings but also as programmers because if you feel like people are going to ridicule you all the time for asking a question, you're not going to ask your question and you're going to probably stay ignorant or you might go Google it by yourself but it's going to take you a longer time to like actually learn things than if you can say, hey, Metsu, I don't know how this works, can you tell to me about it or like I've always wanted to write a JavaScript game, can you help me or I don't really understand how closures work. And people say, oh I know, do you want me to tell you? And like when people can like really learn and interchange from each other as opposed to being mean and tearing each other down you learn so much faster and you become so much of a better programmer than you would otherwise be. And so study after study has shown that people actually learn best when surrounded by like trust and respect and like climate that's friendly. And so I wanted to put a picture of my friend Alex but I ran out of time but my friend Alex from Hacker School, he's essentially the archetypal computer science golden child. He's like he went from like a top school to Microsoft research, he's doing data learning and like data, sorry machine learning and data science and he told me, so he's like I know that I do not look like a typical programmer, he looks like a typical programmer he is the archetype of a programmer and he told me he said I feel very comfortable when people ask me questions to help them and like to answer their questions and I like helping people but when I have questions I actually don't want to ask them, I feel uncomfortable and I'm like wow that's interesting because for me I thought like this guy is so smart, he's like a kind of with 17 or something and you know he seems really smart but he says exactly because people think of I know a lot so I don't want to when I don't know something I don't want to see because I feel like people might laugh at me they might look down on me and so I thought wow if this guy who you know is the archetype of who belongs as a programmer feels uncomfortable asking questions like how many of us also feel uncomfortable without saying it right and so without this kind of nasty like super mean like stack overflow kind of hacker news environment I think people are more free and curious to explore and so what I found in hacker school was you had people that were say really experienced web developers that were like hey I want to learn theoretical computer science because I don't have an academic background or hey I'm an IT consultant and I charge like $150 dollars an hour to big companies I'm going to write a Javascript game for the browser like people felt really free to like do something new that they hadn't tried before just for fun just for something that makes them feel passionate interested in technology and that was like super cool to me and then okay I have four minutes okay I better hurry so number two that I thought was great was hacker school makes a huge effort to have gender parity it's not 50% yet but it's like on average it's like 35 to 45% women which is a lot more than like pretty much any other environment and that's just students and they have a lot of women like facilitators and a lot of women mentors and what I found was really special of course for me as a woman is great because I didn't feel like oh I'm like the only girl in the room and everyone's staring at me and freaking me out but it was great for guys as well and before you say oh it's great because I could go on like there's lots of chicks I can go on and we can go on dates and talk about Python it's gonna be so cool it's not even for that reason no but it's true it's not even for that reason it's just because I think it's really easy if you only ever meet like one girl programmer in your company or in your class it's really easy to feel even if you're someone who's really nice and has the best of intentions to feel like I don't really know how to deal with this person they're different from me I haven't met someone like down before what if I say the wrong thing what if I like insult them without realizing like people just become awkward just because it's not a situation they're in very often even you know even if that person is not like a totally nasty person is really like a person a nice person with the best of intentions but when like every day you have like 30 to 40 female programmers working side by side with you that are helping you that you're helping them that are teachers that are mentors you just kind of get over that stuff and you can move past that into like actually becoming peers and friends and not having that weird tension between like between people where they just don't know how to act with each other and so a good example is part way through hacker school a few of us went to a lock picking meetup that was in New York City that was not part of hacker school that was just a general event and there was maybe five of us I think four women in one guy from hacker school and then the rest of the group was essentially 80 white guys and like one girl looking really uncomfortable trying hard to like you know she was wearing a polo shirt and like trying really hard to you know not look too much like a like like a girl and I was like I've been that girl that's such a terrible position to be in and it was just really night and day between how we dealt with each other and how comfortable we were like making jokes and hanging out and helping each other and giving each other tips and then the giant sausage fest which was like the whole rest of that event where it's just like all of these kind of guys and you know that one girl and comfortable and I was like wow if people could really see how great it can be that environment I really feel like there would be maybe it's idealistic but I feel like a lot of people would lose their objections to having a more gender balanced environment and technology essentially not just for women but just for guys as well and a lot of my guy friends at hacker school said exactly that that it wasn't just good for us but it was good for them so on the first day they told us pretend that your goal was to become the best possible programmer during the next three months how would you approach things and it sounds stupid because obviously you're like well that's why I'm here right but to actually keep that in mind I found that instead of like typing the same stupid thing like ten times I would actually bother to like write a snippet to like not have to repeat myself I would actually bother to like refactor that method instead of like copying, pasting that stupid code like ten times or I would bother to like read the doc to find out to do things it really changed like how I approach things as a programmer like I put a lot more effort into it the other thing was by Melchua who gave an amazing talk about how people learn best in engineering communities and she said in particular it's very important like if you want to learn something that's important to you to find a community of people that care about the same thing particularly if you're someone who's a little bit an outsider or not like the stereotype of whatever it is in that field but just to find people because it's so much more fun to learn with others and it keeps you engaged it keeps you interested you kind of interact with others whereas by yourself it's just boring like and then pair programming I hated pair programming before hacker school I had a program for a job where the dude smelled really bad and I really didn't like him and I was just like totally off the interview for hacker school is mostly pair pair pair programming and I almost did not apply because I hated pair programming so much but there I really found that it was amazing because of this climate of respect it changed everything because you program with a buddy and it's like you really get to see like programming is such an internal process right it's just a mental thing and so it's very interesting to see how does someone also approach that like how do they think of the same task how do they design something how do they use their editor how do they use their tools and it's like basically pretty much everyone from hacker school will say like that was the most valuable part of hacker school was pair programming and I at the end I would definitely agree so yeah and you essentially if there's any questions I'd be happy to answer them