An Interview with Amy Hoy
Hot on the heels of last week’s interview with Sergio Pereira, we were lucky enough to catch up with Amy Hoy. Amy defines herself as a informally educated designer-turned-interface-developer who also programs (and writes, and speaks, and takes pretty pictures). She’s also the co-creator of Twistori.
Amy, you’ve been involved in both the Prototype/script.aculo.us and Ruby on Rails communities since their inception. What was your background? What brought you there?
Amy Hoy: I admit it I was a professional PHP developer. I started out doing freelance design as a teenager but got tired of relying on other people to do the implementation (and quickly realized the lack of respect towards design in general). I’d dabbled in programming since a kid, but PHP was the first language I’d learned fully. I think it was a good start because it required so little to begin and see immediate results.
I had found out about Basecamp from a designer’s community I was part of, waaay back when it was in beta testing. It really stood out in my mind. Later, somebody else posted about this thing they used to build Basecamp, so of course I was intrigued.
I went to the old Ruby on Rails site (back around version 0.7), saw the code samples and fell head over heels. The sparse code really appealed to my designer’s nature and I was sure it would be a big hit with other people too. I’d been doing PHP long enough by that time that I was feeling the pain, and Ruby looked like an amazing solution to that pain.
Somebody felt my pain! And it was awesome. I feel like this could be a meaty episode of Dr. Phil.
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Script.aculo.us I learned about through Rails, and naturally it appealed to me because of all the visual possibilities.
Although you’re not teaching JavaScript per se, you’ve always been inclined in facilitating the learning process, whether it be through your blog, presentations or cheat-sheets. What’s with that?
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AH: I like to teach in general. I’d say the percentage of “educational” content on my blog hovers around the 80-85% mark. I’ve had a number of teachers who changed my life, but none of them were what you’d traditionally call teachers they were authors, mentors, speakers, and so on. I really enjoy being able to do that for other people, and I definitely get off on the intellectual challenge of figuring out the best methods to get my readers/attendees to that “aha!” moment.
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And Javascript, well. JavaScript is a really painful subject to learn from scratch.
Most of the online articles and books either focus on a poor choice of topics (or simply embody bad practices), or leave you hanging by not explaining the whole language, the DOM, events, etc. Or they’re purely references and leave it to you to piece together the whole picture. Or the window they give you into the subject is so narrow as to be useless.
Me, I got dropped suddenly into the JavaScript world in order to build something I’d designed at a former employer. I started knowing almost nothing (and all of it bad). This was back before Prototype had any documentation. I learned a lot reading the tests but it was slow going.
Crash codes
While the whole experience was ultimately exhilarating, the lack of good learning sources meant it was also hair-tearingly frustrating. So I set out to make some.
I can say from experience that it takes a lot of hard work and analysis to create a truly great tech education resource. And traditional book publishers don’t pay well for the effort, either. It’s not at all surprising that there’s no One True Source.
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But my script.aculo.us cheat sheet has been downloaded over 500,000 times. Clearly I’m not the only one who sees a problem.
In the same vein, you’ve teamed-up with Thomas Fuchs (creator of script.aculo.us and Prototype Core committer) to write an ebook on JavaScript “basics”.
AH: Yeah. I wouldn’t call it “basics,” but we are writing about JavaScript: The Language not just JavaScript: Here’s How You Use This Framework. Real, pure JS language skills are very hard to come by these days and that is one of the areas where existing books, etc., really fall down. A lot of people find themselves hamstrung because they’ve started using some framework or toolkit, and when they need to work around it, they realize they don’t know enough JavaScript to do so.
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