Code Corps Ember.js Talk
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Presentation on Code Corps and creating open source software for social good given at the Southern California Ember User Group. This is an extended version of the lightning talk given at the Wicked Good Ember conference.
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Code Corps Ember.js Talk
- 1. “A framework for creating ambitious web applications.”
- 2. “A framework for creating ambitious web applications.”
- 3. Let’s talk about ambition.
- 6. “We were promised flying cars…”
- 7. “…and we got 140 characters.”
- 8. We also got a revolution.
- 13. I guess “tech support” is close, right?
- 18. I personally get regular *demands* for unpaid work…by healthy high profit companies large and small….If I don’t respond in a timely fashion, if I’m not willing to accept a crappy pull request, I/we get labeled a jerk. Daniel Roy Greenfield
- 19. It is a bleak landscape right now….for now the only real option is to try to take care of yourself and hope that some day all of this will be viable. Noah Kantrowitz
- 23. How do we solve hard problems together?
- 24. How do we solve hard problems together?
- 25. Build Fund
- 32. First, you tell us what you care about.
- 33. Then share the skills you know.
- 34. We’ll find projects you’ll like.
- 35. And start making a difference from day one.
- 37. Want to help?
- 38. Want to help?
Editor's Notes
- As developers go, you, as Ember developers, are pretty unique. You’re at this meetup tonight because you like to build ambitious things. And you value community.
- And the ambition you have as an Ember developer, that ambition is a powerful tool. Now, many of us came into a world where we had already walked the moon. But in 1962, Americans were growing increasingly nervous as the Soviet Union outpaced us in science and technology. President Kennedy was touring the United States, trying to convince a skeptical nation to aim high. As he said then: “But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
- And so we left that decade with high expectations.
- We went to the moon. We passed civil rights. We brought about unparalleled welfare and justice reform. We improved education and literacy and made huge strides in science and technology. But our expectations have deflated in the decades that followed.
- To quote Peter Thiel, “We were promised flying cars…”
- “….and we got 140 characters.” Now, this isn’t quite fair to Twitter specifically.
- In fact, Twitter also enabled a revolution.
- Iran’s green revolution was largely owed to instantaneous worldwide communication. Organizers were able to quickly rally supporters. The internet – even Twitter – lets you start movements. Still, Peter’s point remains. If this is the best of our ambitions, if social media is the highest of our mountains, maybe we need to rethink our goals, or at least rethink how we attain them. Easy to say. Harder to do.
- For me it’s been especially hard to determine how to make a meaningful difference. Where do I even start? I thought the best I could do was join the Army or the Peace Corps. Believe it or not, the Army actually seemed a bit more straightforward to schedule. So four years ago, I joined the Army.
- Of course, I assumed serving my country would be a bit different than this. I do love my Soldiers and I love the opportunity to serve them. But I’m still a lowly Lieutenant in a signal unit. That’s not really high impact. Last summer, I grew especially frustrated as I disappeared to Georgia for four months for more Army training.
- While I was away, a wispy-haired 74-year-old democratic socialist started his run for President. I grew inspired. Talk about moonshot. So I rushed over to the website and clicked “Volunteer”, and…
- Okay. Knock on doors… Call voters… I guess I can do tech support? But how do I contribute my actual skills? The skills you and I have as Ember developers feel especially unique in some way. There’s a power to the leverage of building for the internet. You’re building for the whole world. I wanted that kind of impact here.
- Fortunately I found a group called Coders for Sanders, but this was how things were organized. Yes, that’s a giant spreadsheet of projects on Google Docs. And it scrolls much further than I could share in the screenshot. Even for a technical person this is pretty hard to parse. Which projects are worthwhile? How do I get started? How easily can I make time to help? And there were 2,000 of us developers there to organize. So we got started and hustled for volunteers the hard way.
- In two months our ragtag group managed to build a new way to do voter contact anywhere in the country, and we launched it natively on both Android and iOS. The process, though, was painful at times. Another group was working in parallel on almost the exact same project, unbeknownst to either of us. Fortunately we worked on some non-overlapping pieces and managed to merge the code with a half day’s worth of work. But there has to be a better way to build things together.
- And what things have we already built that are suffering? Drive around America. Bridges and roads, many over a hundred years old, crumble and risk collapse. Open source software faces similar risks. This is the infrastructure each and every one of us relies on every single day. Now projects like ember-cli-mirage or ember-cli-deploy may not be the Golden Gate Bridge.
- With their size and scope, they may look more like your city’s plumbing. But if the plumbing in LA stops working…
- And open source is suffering. Back in January Nadia Eghbal wrote a great piece entitled “How I Stumbled Upon The Internet’s Biggest Blind Spot” delving into just how bad the state of affairs really is for open source. Here’s what some of the maintainers have to say.
- This sounds pretty depressing. I thought open source was alive and vibrant? We have GitHub, right?
- Now, open source alone as pure infrastructure is pretty valuable as an enabling tool. Nadia wrote in another post that of Instagram’s $1 billion acquisition, at least $143 million can be traced to the open source infrastructure which accelerated Instagram’s exit. And that’s a very conservative calculation. I’m sure many of us here could argue quite persuasively that Instagram cost 1/10th to build today what it would have a decade ago, largely thanks to open source. But is this why most of us work on open source? To simply be a platform for the next “disruptive” social media startup?
- Many of us here tonight, I’m sure, fell in love with software’s power to open up the world for us. That’s where we circle back to ambition. When we think of the transformative power of the internet, the transformative power of software, do we really want to point to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter?
- Where are the moonshot projects? The ones that tackle low rates of literacy. The ones that improve our understanding of the world. The ones that help with problems like income inequality, or climate change, or infant mortality, or the refugee crisis, or obesity, or… The list goes on and on. And I know how overwhelming this feels, especially personally. I moonlight with Code Corps, consult with Ember to pay the bills; and I’m a weekend warrior and a husband to my very patient wife. I joke to my friends that I have four jobs and I’m not doing any of them very well.
- Now, Ember is one of the most successful projects, largely due to community. But how do we come together to build other hard things, especially where no community exists?
- And you know, when you’ve not contributed to open source before, it’s pretty nerve-wracking. How am I supposed to compare to Robert Jackson when I’m…well, me? Even if you’re a regular, coming into a project and knowing where to start is tough. You couldn’t expect someone to walk through your company’s front door and be productive immediately. And yet many GitHub issues have that expectation. And how do I find the time? Or even find a project to begin with? As a community, how do we answer these questions?
- Both moonshot projects and maintenance projects require us to build and fund them.
- What this really means is coordinating time, ability, and money. You need people who can contribute to a project’s success by opening up their schedule or their wallet, or both. And many of these moonshot projects aren’t fundable because they don’t align well with the profit motive. How are you supposed to pitch a VC on some hand wavy public benefit?
- But that’s not to say there isn’t money out there. $53 billion goes to non-profits in the United States alone each and every year. Kickstarter has seen 11 million people pledge $2.5 billion to 108,000 successful projects.
- Imagine if we had even a fraction of that kind of money, and even a slice of Silicon Beach’s time. What could we build?
- And there are certainly more than enough talented people like you who are willing to take that time. Code for America, for example, has had over 57,000 people attend their meetups around the world. And that’s just for projects focused on civics and local government!
- What we’re missing is that point of coordination, that place that makes things possible. It’s what we made work on the Sanders campaign with string and chickenwire, with Slack and GitHub and Google Docs, along with a lot of lost wages.
- We’re building Code Corps as the place where we can work together to build public software for social good. Here’s how it works right now:
- First, you tell us what you care about. Do you want to fix your local government? Work on literacy in schools? Maybe just help on Ember addons?
- Then tell us what you know. Hopefully everyone here picks Ember.
- We’ll take what you care about and what you know, and use it to recommend projects. Although it’s not public on Code Corps yet, the project on the right there is a project we’re actually working on, which is kind of like Field the Bern for any candidate anywhere.
- From here we can direct you to tasks that you can pick up and work on immediately. We’d love to answer the question: what can I work on in Ember in say 2 hours this weekend that makes a difference? Up next, we’re building a funding platform, where any project can raise small dollar contributions to support their core teams. And GitHub is a big part of our workflow, so we’re working on what you might call a two-way binding to GitHub. Or maybe it’s data down, actions up? Regardless, tasks and comments on Code Corps will sync with GitHub, and you can still do your normal code review process as before.
- I’m proud to say we’ve had more than 30 people contributing their time and energy to Code Corps. We have people joining so quickly I literally haven’t had time to update this slide to reflect everyone.
- And we’d love your help. Our app is fully open source…
- …with Rails on the backend and Ember on the frontend. And a couple weeks ago we just formed a public benefit corporation, which means public good is literally in our charter.
- If any of this resonates with you: if you’ve ever been nervous to contribute to open source, if you’re struggling to maintain an open source project, if you’ve always wondered how to volunteer your technical skills to good causes, or you just want to work on and learn from a public Ember app, then you should come join us. If we reflect on Kennedy for a moment, you’ll notice something interesting in his speech. He said, “We choose to go to the moon.” He repeats it. He repeats it three times. He repeats it because he didn’t see going to the moon as essential, because Americans didn’t see going to the moon as essential. It was an organizing goal. It was an end which brought us the means, the means to self-organize for a greater good. The means to be educated in science and technology. And eventually, the means to make a moonshot happen. I hope you choose to join us. Thank you.