Dear MTV,
I know I don’t exactly fit your age profile anymore but I really want to be MADE into a killer PHP programmer. I love watching your shows on a relaxing Sunday afternoon and I’ve seen girls become prom queens, rappers and skateboarders. How exciting would it be to turn a motivated grrrrrl into an excellent programmer?
I can already imagine dramatic framing shots at 4am with pizza boxes and cola, such as these:
This is me at the RFID Hackers Camp in a futile attempt to write a php Flickr script at 5am. I am a cut-and-paste coder, I can put little pieces together, tweak them a bit and hope they work. However, I would love to be able to produce beauties such as these:
- Interactive storytelling experiment #2: The urban areas of tomorrow by Wilbert Baan
- Google News interpretations by Flickr by Erik Borra
We could show how great the art of producing clean code is and how difficult it is to achieve. And while we’re at it, we could do something really politically correct (meh) such as promoting the fun of technical education and skills to girls.
What do you think MTV?
Anne, I´m sure it would make a wonderful programme. But maybe you should insert some physical exercise, verbal virtuosity or dramatic interaction with skeptic family members. Or something. Oh wait: maybe we could skip the TV-part in MTV.
OMG! Me too! Me too!
I’ve always watched programmers on TV and they look SOOOO beautiful and glamorous and since all my hobbies are totally lame — ballet?! cheerleeding?!?! beauty pagents?!?!?! — none of the geeks at my high school will even come *near* me in the cafeteria!
I know if I can develop awesome web apps after three days hunched over a computer, I’ll get the confidence I need to ask my MIT-bound mega-crush to the senior prom!!!
Please, MTV, help!
Haha.
No seriously, though. MTV, pick me too!
@Arnoud: The excersise program for bloggers already exists :) And there are tons of songs about blogging but now it is time to honor the programmers with a great song. It should definitely start with “Hello World”
@lauren: MADE episodes usually have a timespan somewhere between 30 and 60 days. That should be enough to learn how to build the perfect social-networking web application based on a personal human marriage material recommendation script, right? ;)
@ Anne: I see, what you´re really aiming for is a blogger´s version of Idols! ;-)
Haha, not quite Idols but what I love about the MADE series is that it shows the process and struggle of trying to achieve something. Usually things that are either very different of the things you do in your daily life or things you wish you could but cannot achieve without any help.
It’s tough to sit down every evening for at least an hour with a PHP for Dummies book. It simply doesn’t work. It is a hard and lonely struggle and I think complete emergence is the ‘easiest’ way to learn something. Learn Spanish by living in Spain for a month, or learn PHP by joining a programming summer camp. Oh, if only these would exist :)
Haha, that made me smile, nice one. But when you think of it, a lot of people would be interested in learning PHP. The static website tutorials kind of lack interactivity. It would be a cool project to start a collective of young wanna-be-programmers supervised by a php-pro. In the end we would all love to be a codemonkey sometimes right? I know I do :s
PHP or general coding skills should be added to our education system! Let’s start a w4nn4-b3 php (0££3(71v3 ;)
‘I can has cheezeburger’ should also be included!!111oneoneone
Hahaha, that would make a great show.
Good luck!
Thank you all for the great feedback, it seems that there *is* an audience for such a show and that more people would like to be MADE ;) Let’s see what the summer holidays bring…