Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value.

Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get any advanced degree. In the past, students who missed out on a higher education learned vocational skills – but this stuttered as we moved to an information economy.  Today, students without a higher education generally enter service professions or trades where employment, if they can get it, doesn’t offer much career growth.

There is a new opportunity emerging for young people to do productive, entrepreneurial, satisfying work: they can learn to code. Code isn’t that hard to start to learn – one outsourcing firm takes people with no training and makes them full-time Java programmers in 3 months. (Of course, mastery takes tremendous talent and craft.) Coding isn’t expensive – with netbooks, cloud hosting and storage, and open source software. Beyond a certain point, coders are self-taught, and can continue to advance their skills.  

They’re handing out Gutenberg printing presses out there: with services like Treehouse (I’m a dues-paying member) and Codecademy (and its expertly-timed year of code), countless university courses free online, Google Code University, the warm embrace of Stack Overflow, in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp, summer camps for kids, even the promise of a one-day result with Decoded (the six-minute abs of learning to code), and great organizations like CodeNow (which I’ve been supporting) reaching out to teach code in underserved communities. I’m sure I’ve left many out.

Yet very few high school students learn to code. Almost no high schools teach code as part of the curriculum. Though of course they should — code is literacy, not (just) a specialist skill.  And kids can get started coding early. Many students who would be terrific at coding, a creative, tinkering act, also may not thrive in institutional (school) environments.

There is real demand for coders – even despite overall unemployment – so learning to code produces rewards quickly. Online marketplaces like oDesk and Elance hire starting programmers at rates as high as $15-20 an hour or more. Learning to code is one of the best paths to entrepreneurship. Coding also offers students the joy of creation and mastery of a complex skill. Code may one day be a basic workplace expectation – like emailing, or “proficient in Word.” Young people are also willing to learn: coding now has a brand. The kid who writes an iPhone or Android app, these days, gets the girl (or boy!).

It might even be possible to do more than just learn to code – but also to become an elite coder – without necessarily going to college. We are in the early days of teaching code as a profession. Most academic training is focused on teaching students theory, not practice.  (One Ivy League computer science program only required one course where students actually write code.) Imagine if students who might not otherwise even attend college could become elite coders.

In the U.S., the STEM line of thinking is about creating the next generation of scientists.  In computing, this is even reflected in what we call the study of programming — computer “science.” We could be doing something different (and complementary), teaching students to be makers, not scientists: creating the next generation who can hack, beget, get paid right away, and maybe become entrepreneurs. Learning this would make the high school experience more rewarding, because it would have an immediate result. (I went to a high school with a vocational tradition, Stuyvesant in New York, and wish I had more courses like the architectural drafting class I took for a year.)

I’ve become personally passionate about this idea over the last couple of years. I think it could be a path to helping fix a lot of what doesn’t work right now: our ways of teaching students, powering our economy’s future, and making work a creative and fulfilling way to spend time.

I’m sure there are many more out there working on this — if you’re one of them, hit me up and let’s find a way to make common cause.  And if you think I’m crazy, tell me why.

Spent today at Minecon, the live event for the game phenomenon Minecraft.

If you don’t know it yet, Minecraft is an open, world-building game. Built, initially, by one guy — goes by Notch. Sixteen million people have registered for it, even though it was technically only released today. You download the game, a standalone client, from the Minecraft website. (It is coming to Xbox, and you can play part of the game on iOS and Android.)

Minecraft confirms some long-known truths:

Anyone can create a hit game, distribute it themselves, and entertain millions. Even today, after 4 million units sold, Mojang (the maker of Minecraft) only has 14 employees.

Games don’t necessarily need to “launch” to reach a big audience — they can dribble out, and flood millions.

Games can be put to unexpected, wonderful purposes (like the educational uses popping in schools, promoted by Minecraft Teacher and others).

But Minecraft matters because it demonstrates some powerful new things:

Indie games can be for anyone — not just for traditional core gamers. Families are all over the place at Minecon, some with three generations playing. Apparently someone registered a baby for the event. The traditional game platforms no longer have a monopoly on making games for families.

The browser isn’t there yet, for playing emotionally immersive games. Even a relatively visually simple 3D world like the one in Minecraft, gets built in a separate client.

A game can be shaped by its community. The community doesn’t just talk about the game, they jointly make the game with its creators.

Curious what other ways it matters; I’m sure there are many. Feels like the beginning of something that may last a long time.

Pageload times are a problem for some online media companies – for good reason — heavy content, with video, high-res images, and features jammed in.  (Let’s set aside the separate problem of content/feature bloat, and assume for a second that it’s a good thing to have all that content and all those features.)

IGN sites need to load much faster — and we’re down to 6 seconds or so on a typical site, from 7.5 seconds a year ago.  But it still takes too long to enjoy the site.

But as much as we improve our content and features, about 40% of the load time for IGN.com is still in the ads — even though the ads take up less than a fifth of the real estate on the page.  We introduced an open source JavaScript library to call ads simultaneously and ensure content loads, but there is much more we need to do.

Why are ads slow?  First, the creative is getting better and so it takes longer to load.  Ten years ago, online ads were mostly just flat images and everything else was called “rich” media — anything animated, interactive, and therefore heavier.  Last year, two-thirds of the display ads on the Internet were rich — so rich is the new standard. 

And the delivery of online ads is a complicated handoff from third-party ad servers to creative agencies to clients and to publishers.  Add in targeting services and a daisy chain of ad networks and the delays stretch longer.  This relay race happens under constant deadline, and creative is often discarded after a campaign is over — so there is less re-use of code and tools than there should be, and a lot of invention on the fly. 

Advertisers can’t solve this alone.  Advertisers don’t spend their time focusing on shaving tenths of a second from load times, but publishers do.  

So online publishers need to help advertisers by making it easier to speed up ads.  We need to not make ad calls when ads are unsold, we need to treat it like a shared issue — not like someone else’s problem.

This is an opportunity for advertisers — users would enjoy their marketing campaigns, and probably pay more attention to them (though we need to do the research on that), if they only loaded faster.  In fact, online ad blocking tools promote how much faster it is to surf the web if you’re not looking at the ads.

The advertisers still need to have a full palette of creative choices: explosions, video, animations, all that stuff.  We need to apply all the tools of speeding up the web — compressing files, minifying, reducing requests.  Imagine a toolkit creative agencies could use that would create faster ads out of the box.  We should see how far we can get.

(And thanks to Mediapost for sharing this with their audience as well.)

I run a company whose product is written in code, and I don’t yet speak the language.  I sometimes feel like a newspaper publisher who has to take his editor’s word for it that the articles are good.  You trust your people, you know you could never write the way they do, but it would still be good to be able to read.

Coding, no surprise, is also a different kind of thought from what I do all day every day.  I have to eliminate distractions to do it, and – if I can ever get that flowing thing going – I bet it could even be meditative.  I’m enjoying the variation in ways of thinking.

I love the imagination of it – I find myself putting as much work into thinking what to build as how to build it.  And only some of the “how to build” work is actually coding, more of it is envisioning how the different pieces of a project should relate to each other, what they should each try to do.

I love how alien it is to me.  Every time I open my editor, I’m reminded that I can’t just “jump in for a few minutes” the way I can with my usual work – either because coding isn’t like that, or because I’m not good enough yet.  It takes me time to rev up, remember what I was supposed to be doing and how it fits together.  Forced syntax, ugly websites from the 1990s that still seem to be the sources of record for a beginner’s questions, the sense of a whole world that I’ve only just begun to explore…