Using technology for good: A beginner’s guide

Three years ago, I had never written a single line of HTML. A year and a half ago, all I knew about Python was that it was a programming language. And several months ago, I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to use javascript. But the various websites I’ve helped build for BRUTE LABS incorporate all of these elements and more. And that’s one of my favorite things about the web: it’s just so darn accessible! Practically anyone can access it, and practically anyone has the tools to learn to create things on it.

A few years ago, I was working a job where I had a lot of free time. I would watch videos or read a book or shoot the breeze with other similarly under-employed friends. But that all got old pretty quickly so I gave myself a project of redesigning my boss’s website. I didn’t know much about web technologies at that point, so I started out by finding some websites that looked halfway decent. A pretty incredible thing about the Internet is that you can see the source code of pretty much any web page in your browser (usually with the keyboard shortcut Control+U). Think about that - it’s nuts! It’s like having access to the set of a movie you’re watching to see how a scene is created. Or having access to the schematics of the car you’re driving to learn how all the parts interact. Practically any page on the Internet is free for your careful dissection and re-use.

So I went to those nifty-looking sites I’d found, looked at the source code, and immediately saw a lot of nonsense that I didn’t understand. Naturally, I started searching the Internet for the things I didn’t understand. And lo and behold, another crazy thing about the Internet is how many wonderful tutorials people put together to help you learn things. Sites like W3Schools give you practically everything you need to learn about how to build websites, for free. And there are countless other unofficial pages, blogs, and videos that people have put together out of their passion for sharing knowledge. With these tools, I was able to learn all I needed to know about HTML and CSS, and built a not-too-embarrassingly-bad site for my boss.

Skip ahead a year or two and I was working at the same company as one of the BRUTE LABS cofounders, who told me about the Mchopa project which he had been planning for some time. He had the idea and the design but needed someone to make the site work - in other words, turn it from a static site to a dynamic site, a web application. I hadn’t done anything like that before, but volunteered to give it a shot. A few months later, with the help of many online tutorials and a lot of trial and error, we were ready to launch mchopa.com, written in Python using Google App Engine.

Every time I ran into a challenge I thought I wouldn’t be able to overcome, I was able to find somewhere online that gave me the answer, from online tutorials, to the Python library docs, to full source code examples - if you just look, you can find what you’re seeking.

Building the run! at Red Rock site was a similar experience with new obstacles - this was to be a site with a full log-in system, taking user input and providing customized pages based on each user’s data, for potentially hundreds of users. It was a scale problem I hadn’t had before, and I learned a lot just from solving all those problems. Once again, the Internet came to my rescue as I was able to find pretty much everything I needed in the online documentation. With a basic understanding of programming concepts, a few tutorials and some examples, we were able to produce a fairly robust web site that provided value to a large number of users in a safe, secure, and useful way.

Is there another subject area whose trade secrets are so not secret? For example, could you learn to be a particle physicist the same way? Would you be able to do anything productive with that knowledge, practically, at home? Would anyone hire you? That’s the amazing thing about the web. It enables practically anyone, with the time and interest, to learn to do useful things on it. And those abilities are highly marketable and valuable.

This quality of the web fits in nicely with BRUTE LABS’ mission to address global challenges using design and technology. One thing that technology does extremely well is scale - as important as design is, you need technology to be able to exponentially expand the impact of good design. And fortunately for us, learning to use technology is as easy as having a computer and the desire and initiative to seek the knowledge. BRUTE LABS depends on this, because we believe strongly in open source altruism - the idea that the good we can produce via one implementation of a technology solution is increased many times over if we make it easy for others to implement that solution in different contexts. So instead of designing a site for a specific artist (i.e. the Mchopa project) we want to design a platform that many artists can benefit from. The accessibility of the web and of web technologies enables us to do this and we hope to aggressively drive these types of open source altruistic projects in the years to come.

Danny Bowman, BRUTE Core