hack.pledge() Mentorship Movement Launches with Broad Industry Support

Dozens of coding celebrities, tech companies, and nonprofits unite to improve the quality of software development worldwide

SAN FRANCISCO – Dec. 1, 2014 – New Year’s Eve is fast approaching, and in the programming world, resolving to make a difference has never been easier.  hack.pledge(), a movement for programmers worldwide to assemble and learn from each other, has officially launched.  Developers can pledge to either give or receive 1 hour of mentoring in their language of choice, and the hack.pledge() initiative will connect them with a mentor (or mentee) in 2015.

Industry greats like Grady Booch (inventor of the Unified Modeling Language), Jon Skeet (the #1 answerer on StackOverflow), and Bram Cohen (inventor of Bittorrent) have already signed the pledge. To join the movement, sign the pledge at http://hackpledge.org/.

The hack.pledge() was announced today at hack.summit(), a virtual conference for programmers that raises money for coding nonprofits. hack.summit() boasts over 50,000 attendees, making it officially the largest programmer conference in history. The summit features dozens of the coding world’s most esteemed programming language creators, open source contributors, book authors, and major contributors to Computer Science, many of whom have signed the pledge.

“There is currently a 10x-100x difference in productivity between an average programmer and a great one” said Ed Roman, founder of hack.pledge().  “Programming is one of the only professions with such a huge discrepancy.  And it’s correctable with mentoring.”

The landmark book, The Mythical Man-Month, pins the average developer productivity at 10-20 lines of code per day.  This is especially problematic for demographics who may not have access to social networks of programming peers to support them. That lack of community can lead to frustration and discouragement, and ultimately widens the diversity gap in programming.

“By working together, we can learn from each other, waste less time being stuck, write cleaner code, and program faster, so that we can collectively improve our skills and work towards becoming master craftsmen in software development,” Roman said.

Developers of all experience levels are encouraged to participate and benefit:

• Novices can learn from amateur developers to print “Hello, World!” in a new language

• Amateurs can sharpen their skills by pair-programming with expert developers

• Even the most expert developers get stuck, and can use a helping hand from another veteran to get “unstuck” in their hour of need

Developers who pledge to receive mentoring are automatically put on a waitlist to be paired with an appropriate mentor. When the program officially kicks off in 2015, developers will automatically be connected to each other via email as supply permits. hack.hands(), a code mentorship platform, will be subsidizing the infrastructure costs and contributing its technology to the initiative to allow for this connectivity.  Developers who wish for a face-to-face connection are also welcome to fulfill the pledge manually in their own local community without the use of technology.

hack.pledge() has received broad industry support from prominent nonprofit partners like Bridge Foundry, CoderDojo, and Ladies Learning Code; relevant media partners like InfoQ, HackerRank, and Major League Hacking; and tech industry partners like Cloud9, Appcelerator, and Famo.us.

To see what the hack.pledge() is hoping to achieve (and how), check out their mission video at http://www.hackpledge.org.

About hack.pledge()

hack.pledge() is a movement for programmers worldwide to assemble and mentor each other for 1-hour in their time-of-need in 2015.  By working together, we can learn from each other, waste less time being stuck, write better-architected code, and program faster, so that we can collectively improve our skills and work towards becoming master craftsmen in software development.  For more information, contact info@hackpledge.org.