Today’s blog post is over at USV announcing our investment in Shippo. I have written previously about how the future of programming will consist of composing applications from different APIs. We already have quite a few building blocks in our portfolio with Twilio (communications), Dwolla (payments) and Clarifai (intelligence). Shippo adds shipping which is critical for any application that touches the movement of goods. You can also read more about the financing and the company’s plans on Sh...

I love programming. I also encourage people to learn some programming because (a) it is a useful way of thinking and (b) much of the world will be programmable. Here is a quick example that I just encountered when I prepared yesterday’s Tech Tuesday Index. I had a document with links to every post looking like this:But what I really wanted were the post titles as the text for each link. Now I could have manually gone and followed each link, copied the post title and then replaced the text. Te...

I learned how to program on this Apple II over 30 years ago. Over that time period – as a first approximation – programming has stayed the same. Yes, I have learned new tools and new programming languages, but programming still amounts to typing a bunch of text into an editor in a syntax that’s generally easier to read for a machine than a human. That is about to change dramatically. When I teach programming to novices I introduce it by saying: programming is just telling a machine what to do...

A couple of days ago there was a much favorited and retweeted tweet by the often funny Startup L. Jackson Whenever someone tells me “coding is the new literacy” because “computers are everywhere today” I ask them how fuel injection works. Now I happen to think that this is wrong in an important way but right in another and it is important to pick those two apart. Let me start by how it is wrong. Coding is knowing how to drive the car, not how to tune or repair the fuel injection. There is a h...

It is now six years ago that we at USV held our one day mini conference on “Hacking Education.” A lot has happened since then. We have made investments in Codecademy, Duolingo, Edmodo and Skillshare. MOOCs really took off with classes that have been taken by tens of thousands of students. Susan and I started homeschooling for our children. And yet when I think about what is possible in theory it still feels like we are early on. One of the things that I envision is an interactive learning env...

Earlier this year I had a blog post about how writing software applications in-house is making a comeback. I was reminded of this when I attended the HackNY hackathon at NYU over the weekend. I was there to help Susan with representing Ziggeo, her startup, which provides an API for video recording and playback. The number of APIs and open source projects out there that do amazing things is simply staggering. Watching some other NY based startups present their APIs and feeling the excitement a...

One of the things I always realize as I write Tech Tuesdays is just how much there is to potentially know on any given topic. Entire books have been written on concurrency alone and there is already a long list of research papers published in 2013. Sometimes this realization can be genuinely daunting – any one human can know so little of all available knowledge. But I digress. Today’s post will be an attempt to write a conclusion to this mini series on concurrency. As I pointed out at the end...

Last Tech Tuesday, we learned about atomic actions as a way of dealing with the problems arising from concurrency. I ended that post by pointing to the limits of atomic actions – most notably that the operating system and/or database system cannot provide arbitrarily complex atomic actions as it cannot possibly anticipate all the needs of different programs. At the time I also raised the question as to how atomic actions can be provided in the first place! Let’s start with the second question...

This will be almost the last Tech Tuesday post in the initial series on programming. The basic premise of this series was that programming is a lot like giving a person instructions for how to do something. As I had mentioned in the very first post of the series and then again in the recap, one challenge is that we may not be the only one providing instructions. And from every day life we know how hard it can be to be on the receiving end of this. Imagine for a moment working in a matrix orga...

Welcome back to Tech Tuesday. We are still in the process of wrapping up the initial series on programming. In the interim review I had identified a couple of high level questions that had not yet been answered dealing with code that has been written. Just before the end of the year we looked at bugs and debugging and I mentioned that there are two types of testing: unit testing and black box testing. More on these today. One key purpose of testing is to identify bugs before they are exposed ...