This talk will present a vision for how our tutorials and code examples can influence new developers in ways beyond helping them to code, and exposing them to new ideas and making the ideologies embedded within code clearer. I will make a case for and present several ways we might develop the equivalent of 'media literacy' in code.
Ruby doesn't yet have geospatial libraries, but there's a new movement of developers to make mapping platforms and tile servers as easy to build as a Rails apps.
Rubyists represent an interesting demographic because so many of them -- myself included -- are new programmers, coming in from MOOCs like CodeAcademy or accelerators like LaunchAcademy. Code examples include Ten-Minute Blogs and Twitter clones, and are generally considered ideology-neutral. However, these examples have their own ideologies, and code examples could be more conscious of and deliberate about the ideas they present. Tutorials be could a place to influence new programmers, nudging them towrds doing work for the social good.
This talk presents a vision for a tutorialscape that exposes developers to code problems with greater impact, through straightforward examples. Ideas include:
- making systemic visible racism by: mapping the relationship between transit times and race
- acknowledging the influence of historical oppressions in the present day by: displaying current demographic distribution in relation to historical redlining districts
The talk will provide counter-arguments if time.