Introducing Code Words

The Hacker School community has its share of prolific writers. Shortly after I started working here and reading everyone’s blogs, I realized that there was an opportunity to share the work of Hacker Schoolers, residents and alumni with a broader community of programmers. When I mentioned this to Sonali, she put me in touch with Sean Murphy (W'14), who had had much the same idea a few months earlier.

After a slew of meetings to figure out what Code Words was going to be, we came to a consensus: we wanted to create a quarterly journal to collect the work of folks in our community and share the joyful approach to programming and learning that typifies Hacker Schoolers. Like Hacker School itself, we want to make Code Words accessible and useful to both new and seasoned programmers.

We decided to see if there was any greater interest in the project, and the emphatic response to a call for submissions and editors confirmed that there was. With help and sage advice from several members of our community including Peter Seibel, Sumana Harihareswara, and Sasha Laundy, we put together contracts for our writers (we’re using the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license), a style guide, an editor’s manual and an editorial calendar. We edited the first issue on GitHub.

The process was not without hiccups. And in typical Hacker School fashion, there was also plenty of improvisation. But thanks to the work of the Hacker School community, some great design and development work from Sonali and Zach, and one of the greatest 404 pages of all time thanks to Alan and Dave, Issue One of Code Words is finally here.

We’re excited to share it with you, and to hear what you think.