Monday 26 February 2018

"Generation Z Developers" - new Leanpub Book

In the last couple weeks I been been working on a book called "Generation Z Developers" which you can now get it for free from Leanpub

As with all my books, the content is released under an creative commons license and hosted on this GitHub repo

One difference with this book, is that I'm using Hugo for the static site generation of the book and the leanpub content generation (and it is helping a lot)

I'm including below the current introduction to the book which provides a good explanation of why I wrote it.

Let me know what you think of it, and what other topics or ideas should be included.

https://leanpub.com/generation-z





Hi Generation Z Developer, if you are passionate developer who wants to learn as much as you can about your craft, this is the book for you.
I decided to write this book after doing a series of presentations to Gen Z audiences, where I realised a number of key gaps in your generation is understanding of the history behind a number of key technologies that underpin the technological revolution that we are the in middle of.
Here is the slide that started it all, how many do you recognise?



My presentation started by me asking the audience if they recognised those logos, and then realising that not only they didn’t recognised most of the logos, they didn’t knew the history behind them. More importantly why they where created, and what was the problem (or itch) they addressed.
All these icons where ‘catalysts of change’ and it is important to understand the history behind them, why they occurred, and what happened next
Each one of these icons changed the world of technology, and the paradigms shifts that they created and still impacting our world today.
For example one of these changes/revolutions was the Creative Commons copyright license, which was one of my ‘WFT you don’t know what that means’ realizations. Creative Commons gives a number of rights to the consumer of creations. This book is release under an ‘Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0’ license, which basically means you are free (as in freedom) to use all the materials and content from this book (only requirements are that you provide some acknoledgement of the source and that you use a similar license). You can even sell books based on content from this book.
As you will seen thorough the book, what I find interesting, is not that that a particular technology or ideas allowed X to happen. What matters to me are the ways those ideas change how we act, how we think and how we behave.
We are in the middle of a massive technological and cultural revolution and you need to decide if you want to be a pawn, a player or even a play-maker in this new world. If you don’t understand the past, you are bound to not only repeat past mistakes, but you will not even understand what game is being played.
Please join me in this interesting trip down memory lane, where I will try to explain how I understand and learned from a multitude number of technologies, ideas and events.