Joe Kanter

When I was about eight, we got a Christmas present that looked like a laptop for kids: a full keyboard, a small dot-matrix screen, a handful of games. One game — BASIC — just showed a cursor. You could type, but as soon as you pressed enter it gave a cryptic error. We showed our parents, and we all chalked it up as broken. Then I found the instructions. Every game got a couple of paragraphs; BASIC got twenty pages. The next day, on a long car trip in the rear-facing back seat of our station wagon, I worked through them — and by the time we arrived, I'd written a program that put dots on the screen in a pattern. I eventually figured out that all computers have a "game" like this inside it, and I just needed to figure it out.

This wasn't a game. I was speaking with the computer — telling it how to draw pixels on a screen — and it had its own way of talking back, through error messages. This was a language. And the better I got at learning it, the more complex things we could do together.

Years later I stood in front of a hundred-plus adults teaching full-stack development, and the curriculum's language didn't reach all of them. So I went looking for languages that did. I brought in boxes and toys to show how functions take things in and hand things back. I bought scrabble tiles so we could push strings around a table and watch them concatenate. And I learned to structure everything as "I do, you do, we do": show someone what we're about to do, let them drive while I watch, then work side by side. I still run every training that way.

Building a team works the same way. You learn the language — the culture — that's already there and build with its grain, rather than paving it over with process.

The purest version of all of it is DavIO, a box of buttons, sounds, and lights I built so my brother, an adult with severe disabilities, could make choices for himself. Technology in service of a person, not a spec.

All these years later, the job hasn't really changed. Find the language, learn it, and see what we can do together.