No. 121 — A Reintroduction ⫶ Three Volcanoes ⫶ Germinal

The opposite of hype is not pessimism, but specificity.

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

Photos by Fernanda Cebrián / Rebuild.net

It’s Bouleau Germinal An CCXXXIV, greetings from Paris. For twelve years after the Revolution France ran on a calendar where every day was named after a plant, an animal, or a tool. The weeks were ten days. Months were named for weather by a playwright called Fabre d’Églantine. Germinal is the month of germination. Today belongs to the birch tree, bouleau. I love a calendar that pays attention.

Speaking of paying attention: I did some digging and discovered roughly 60% of you have been here since the beginning, five years ago, some from way longer. But that means almost half of you are newer. I started this newsletter during the pandemic and I've been writing as if everyone knows the backstory, so: a reintroduction.

1.

A year ago I sent out a reader survey (it’s still open, if you want to say hi). I wanted to know who’s here. Here are some of the people reading this letter alongside you:

A preschool teacher in Slovenia who discovered Seymour Papert and now teaches computer science to children aged one to six through unplugged, open-ended activities. She also plays ukulele.

A learning experience designer in Antigua, Guatemala, surrounded by three volcanoes.

A Syrian illustrator and programmer in Istanbul who collects things that are red.

A data engineer in London rediscovering the indie web through RSS and the fediverse. He said it brought him a more hopeful eye for our future.

A school principal in Nigeria whose dissertation was on educational robotics for little kids.

2.

Looking at these responses makes me proud of the people here. I love this little corner of the internet. Sometimes it feels strange to write about my everyday life, my readings, my obsessions - with no guarantee anyone is listening. These responses reminded me you are.

3.

So hi, I’m Linda.

I’m a Finnish writer and illustrator living in Paris. I started my career in the early startup scene in Helsinki, co-founding Rails Girls, building a disassemblable computer at Stanford, and working as the first community manager at Codecademy in New York.

In 2014, I put a children’s book about coding on Kickstarter. It was called Hello Ruby, and it changed everything. The book has since been translated into almost 40 languages, and I’ve spent the last twelve years thinking about how children learn to think with computers. Somewhere along the way I gave a TED talk, which over two million people have watched.

The biggest shift in my thinking came from a place that has nothing to do with technology: Reggio Emilia, a small town in northern Italy with a radical approach to early childhood education. Two ideas stayed with me. One: knowledge isn’t transmitted, it’s constructed. Two: the environment is the third teacher. That second idea led me from books to playgrounds - last year Helsinki built the world’s first playground designed to teach computer science through physical play.

This year I published my first book for adults, Nähdä maailma hiekanjyvässä, about how computers see the world. I’m working on a second one on biology, computation, and how life learns to become.

4.

One thing I've learned is that it helps to have an archive. I always envy artists who get a mid-career retrospective. It must be thrilling to see how your thinking evolves, laid out in front of you. I've started building mine: a writing archive on my personal website (since, who knows what will happen with these platforms). I think the value of a person is not only in what they produce, but in how they understand. Maintaining a thick archive, taking reading notes, documenting the ideas that influence us.. As time goes on, that difference matters more. A few favorites from past years:

• No. 18 - on why I teach algorithms with pancakes

• No. 8 - on the importance of drawing

• The Lost Coder - a piece I did for Helsingin Sanomat on punchcard operators and early Finnish programmers

5.

Here’s another thing I’ve learned: it helps to say out loud what you’re interested in. To find like-minded people in this fractured online world, you have to be specific. As the editors of The Logic once put it: the opposite of hype is not pessimism, […], but specificity.

So, specifically: I’m working on a new Hello Ruby book about large language models (and writing it as a secret). I’m trying to understand how to move several playground projects that are stuck in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land. Hoping to see Noguchi’s New York and some of these unrealised playgrounds in New York. I’m spending more time thinking about embodied cognition (all that Merleau-Ponty coming in handy finally!). I’m reading How Africa Works by Joe Studwell. I’m hitting refresh to get tickets to Black Pearl: meditations for Josephine at the Paris Opera.

Your turn: what, specifically, are you interested in?