Perception

linuxNUS started the Hack Workshop Series about a couple of months back, and I’ve been fortunate to be in touch with the core team driving this program. It’s a series of workshops covering both technical and non-technical material, and one of the aims of this program is getting people exposed to a range of skills that will hopefully help them bring their ideas to market. I got to be involved more recently with the PHP and CodeIgniter workshop, and I was pretty disappointed about the lack of follow up or disconnect after it was conducted.

My personal interest and involvement can be attributed to a few reasons. Of course, the idea of learning to learn is a great philosophy to espouse, but I think it is also important to try and find out why people aren’t interested in learning certain skills beyond the scope of academia, and how that can be changed. My passion for web design and development have driven me this far, and a positive outcome of it is that I’ve been able to build some ideas that I’ve had. I believe that ideas are worthless, and I think it’ll be great if people did have the knowledge and know-how to actually execute them.

That’s where this program comes in great, by highlighting to students that it isn’t difficult to pick up technical skills by any means, and at the same time pointing out resources that can help them. But that’s where the effects of the workshops are limited as well, in my opinion, as they don’t serve a greater function beyond a kind of exposure module, trusting it in the hands of the students to take this knowledge and do something with it. I’ve attended a couple of other workshops before, and unless I’m extremely invested or interested in a particular topic, I don’t normally follow up on what’s been taught as the context seems to have been lost.

Learning is best done when one is actually working on something one is passionate about, and this is a factor that affects whether the students take away anything from the workshop series. It’s why I think examining motivations is probably the more challenging aspect of the Hack Workshop Series. Do people desire to build the products that they envision, whether for fun or as a startup? Why do they attend the workshops, or perhaps more importantly, what do they hope to gain from it? A lot of students fall back to the comfortable lifestyle that is more easily rationalised- like participating in hall or co-curricular activities and so on. Building a project which tangible benefits currently cannot be seen is probably much less appealing.

While I think there’s a general lacking of a pervasive entrepreneurial culture in the faculty, creating a hacker culture is not something I really hope to do. I think that’s where I feel a bit deviant from some of the current objectives of the Hack Workshop Series. I’m more keen in meeting individuals who are talented and passionate, and trying to find out what’s keeping them from going out and building great products. Is it that they lack technical knowledge or perhaps a team? My own agenda would be to help these people plug these gaps in whatever way that I can.

The reason for this is a reflection of how I even got into this field in the first place- that if my brothers didn’t expose me to HTML over a decade ago, or if I never got my hands on Photoshop, my life would certainly be very different today. Some barriers extend beyond just motivation, and it’s really an interesting problem to look at and try to solve. I’m currently getting a couple of my friends started with HTML and CSS, and it’ll be exciting to see them start working on their ideas.