There's a lot of buzz around technology education at the moment. The old ICT courses which taught children to be passive consumers are being overturned as schools in the UK are encouraged to set up their own curricula with programming at it's core. At the same time after-schools clubs are growing in popularity with projects like Code Club operating in nearly a thousand British schools.
We first saw it with food. People getting back to nature and growing their own veggies, or hitting the kitchen to bake their own sour dough. We then saw it with the the rise of the craft movement, inspiring a generation of knitters, potters and jewellery makers take back the skills their great grandparents once owned but were lost in the rush to convenience.
Considering the World Wide Web was created to facilitate the sharing of academic research, I've always been surprised by how little of this I see online. In the early days of the Web, most of the sharing seemed to be done by amateurs and hobbyists. However as businesses discovered the value of the Web, these amateurs turned professional and the discipline of Web Design was born.
I occasionally hear people grumbling on Twitter about the "same old faces" appearing in web design magazines and at conferences. As somebody who takes an active interest in nurturing new talent, I'd hate to think that a deliberate "glass ceiling" had been erected to prevented new people from progressing in our industry.
I first came across the term Minimum Viable Product when I dropped into a talk by Eric Reis at the Web 2.0 Expo in New Year a few year's back. As a company that has always worked on variable scope projects, defining a MVP seemed like a great way of managing client expectations.
Over the last few years I've noticed a strange and disturbing trend amongst web practitioners. There was a time—not so long ago—when passionate individuals would blog about their work for no other reason than to share their discoveries. The more prolific of these individuals built up an online reputation and became seen as experts. Some of the more articulate ones were asked to write books or present their thoughts at conferences, and received a modicum of success.