I’m excited to announce that my company has raised a seed round of $975K from several leading angels and venture capital firms. Our VC’s are Bessemer Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Atlas Ventures. Our angels include Naval Ravikant, Bill Lee, James Hong, Othman Laraki, Karl Jacob, and several other fantastic angels. We’re thrilled this entire group of investors share LearnBoost’s vision for developing free and amazing software for schools.

In early August, LearnBoost will release our free, easy-to-use, and beautiful application built on the powerful technology we’ve developed. LearnBoost completely replaces other gradebook providers, both free and paid. Our accounts give teachers a free gradebook to manage their classroom, as well as integrated software to create and manage lesson plans, track attendance in a list or innovative visual format, maintain schedules, import and integrate Google calendars, “tag” standards to assignments and lesson plans, and much more. If you are a teacher, or know a teacher, they can use our software for free — please tell them to get on our free account list.

We’ll be using this funding to move towards developing the best student information system on the market, in addition to the free teacher software we’ll be releasing in August. We’re aiming right at Blackboard, Pearson, and other slow legacy software providers with our free, wonderful offerings. We closed our financing a few months ago, so we already have a team in place to reach our goals. That said, we’re always looking for more talent; if you are a developer or designer and want to be part of a fast-growing team dedicated to education and open source software, please check out our jobs page.

So what’s next? If you’re a teacher or know a teacher, tell them about LearnBoost and make sure they get on the free account list. Our free and amazing software can be used by any teacher and in our test phase we’ve gotten lots of praise already. I’m excited for our release in early August and to continue to share our open source releases and developments.

Guillermo Rauch
LearnBoost CTO

You’ll find it listed under the “Modern and Elegant” category, where Devthought has some strong competition. You might want to check out the other categories, and visit the other contestants’ beautiful websites.

Please vote and spread the love!

The winners will be decided by the public, so it’ll be nice if you cast your vote for your all-time favorite Devthought! As for the prizes, winners will get a badge, $200 cash via Paypal, and excellent life-time hosting (which I’d love).

I’m signing up for the Best Modern and Elegant category, which probably also means some strong competition

If we wanted to get an idea of how each of them is involved in our ideas, feelings, thoughts, decisions and motivation (which are key in our daily and professional lives), we should picture ourselves as an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, the only part we see from the surface, is the conscious mind. It’s logical, organized, and we can control it, but still small. The vast and voluminous underlying mass is the unconscious mind. It’s disorganized, illogical, irrational, but defining in how we act.

Modern psychology has attempted to classify how good we are at a certain skill by observing how deep it perforates that iceberg. It thus describes four stages of competence an individual can achieve. In this article I’ll try to apply this simple scheme to the skill we practice everyday: programming.

Stage 1: Unconscious incompetence

John is a young web developer. He used to be a law student, but he thought that wasn’t where the money’s at, so in the blink of an eye he made the switch. He was always good at fixing his buddies computers, so he figured it would be easy. He quickly looked up a few places (near his home, naturally) where he could learn the job. After six months he claims to be a Web Development expert, and his resume lists every programming language, software application and platform known to man.

John, in reality, is a ruthless copypaster. He thinks succeeding at displaying an alert window is all there’s to Javascript. PHP? Piece of cake: he installed WordPress. Linux? He booted an Ubuntu LiveCD, he could surely set up a cluster of load-balanced Apache web servers. His knowledge knows no frontiers.

The problem here is that John is unaware of all he could learn, so he simply doesn’t. He’s in a bubble that no one at the online forums or mailing lists he usually visits can burst, when they try to gently explain the root of his problems is his superficial knowledge. And sadly, his hourly rate is bigger than yours and mine combined.

John is unconsciously incompetent.

Stage 2: Conscious incompetence

Mark is a math teacher. He works at a small downtown university which he wishes had at least five times the resources it currently has. He believes they’re a few steps back from other institutions when it comes to technology, so he decides to get hands to work. He wants to build an online platform to share the material of the courses with the community.

Mark has a naturally logical mind. He knows that in order to execute that task he’ll need to do his research, get information. His quest starts in Wikipedia, but at the end of a long browsing session, he’s learned that a few groups of people around the world offer Open Source solutions to his problem.

He picks the project he thinks best suits his needs. He proceeds to read the documentation and tutorials he finds on the website, and finally downloads the program. All his excitement fades away when he sees that ‘Database connection error’ issue. He tries and tries, even triple-checks his steps, to no avail. Mark is not irritated, he knows it’s not his field of expertise.

He heads to the mailing list and describes his problem with all the exactitude his knowledge allows, which is little. He warns everyone that he’s not exactly sure of what he’s doing, so he’ll welcome more documentation to read, or any tips people can spare. He won’t have to wait long for a solution, because he’s doing the right thing.

Mark is consciously incompetent.

Stage 3: Conscious competence

It’s been two years since Adrian picked up his first HTML book. It clearly has been a one-way ride, for all Adrian thinks about every day is how to improve at what he loves. A few months ago he picked up his first freelance jobs in a website, which he executes passionately despite how low the pay and how basic the task is, even to him.

Of one thing he’s convinced: the best way to learn is to persevere, try and fail, and try again. He always researches how to best execute a task, since it doesn’t come naturally to him. He has to try hard to produce secure code, so he audits it time after time. He fixes it time after time.

The other day he wrote 30 or 40 lines of code for a personal project of his. He can’t help but feel a little disappointed when, browsing the net a few days later, he sees an effortless and much more elegant execution in half as many lines. He wonders when he’ll be able to write solutions of that quality on his own, straightforwardly. However, after a bit of thought, he’s searching his files. He knows he has to rewrite that piece or he won’t sleep well that night. He won’t be copypasting it.

Adrian’s on his way to become an excellent professional, but he’s not giving himself titles, he can wait.
Adrian is consciously competent.

Stage 4: Unconscious competence

This is the ultimate stage of programming mastery. It’s not only the result of accumulated knowledge, but the result of a set of logic rules that have been slowly imprinted on the individual’s mind through the years.

We know we’re dealing with such a person when one cannot help but admire the ease with which extremely complex solutions are provided. This type of programmer seems to smell, not think, his way to a solution.

Writing optimized, maintainable and secure code, applying design patterns and picking the right set of tools he’ll be working with come naturally. This guy can work with ease on multiple languages and platforms.

Closing thoughts

After reading these examples I hope you’re as convinced as me of the validity of applying this model of thought to this particular field.

It’s worth mentioning that some authors suggest a fifth stage, which is reflective competence, described as the ability to teach and convey that what was learned and now is known unconsciously. We may see this in talented individuals who can teach and explain (even in front of crowds) as an apparent second-nature (John Resig quickly comes to mind).

You’re welcome to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

For those longtime readers of Devthought, or at least for those who can notice the change, I offer a walkthrough of this long awaited modification.

Better content organization

To keep content coming to you whenever I have time, I’ve separated the articles and explanations in the Blog section, while small tips, fun stuff and links are now in the Thought page, which acts as a tumblelog.

Projects, scripts and the MooTools plugins you’ve come to love are also in their special place, for quick access to downloads, READMEs, demos and examples.

Finally, the home displays a featured article picked by me, by using the new WordPress 2.7 sticky feature.

A nicer design

The previous blog failed to convey my design and UI crafting skills. I decided to come up with a fresher look and a header animation that reminds you of my Javascript and MooTools addiction on each visit.

I coded a flexible Weather animation class that will allow me to extend the weather variations in the future. Maybe sometime I’ll make it match with the visitor’s country current weather

Ajaxification

The posts and comments navigation, search and comment submission experience has been drastically improved by incorporating ajax calls. Special URLs are formed by Javascript so that WP-Super-Cache still does its job, which means speed and server reliability is assured.

Naturally, everything works if you turn Javascript off.

Syntax highlighting

I’ve integrated and modified the WP-Syntax plugin so that all snippets of code are syntax highlighted, ready to download, print and copy.

This is a snippet of code


row 1, cell 1
row 1, cell 2


row 2, cell 1
row 2, cell 2

Twitter integration

Even though I’m not a huge Twitter fan (not that I’ve got anything against it), the rest of the world seems to be. Here’s how it’s integrated:

• My last tweet is displayed on the homepage
• Whenever I write a new post, a tweet is automatically sent
• The tweetbacks (Twitter responses) are displayed next to the comments and pingbacks

Speaking of change, I’m glad to announce the future availability of WP-o-Matic 1.0 with its new website (which has been in the oven for longer than a year!). You’ll see many new features, bugfixes, and the birth of a great little community.

I’ll be releasing two other small WordPress plugins that developers will find specially useful. One of them is Base-Plugin, a template plugin architecture aimed to make your own plugins preparation easier. It features a very small template management system, it sets variables and functions that you might find yourself writing over time after time, and more.

And for those who wish to include details about their plugins hosted at WordPress Extend in their websites, Extendfetch will be nothing short of amazing. It fetches and lets you display the number of downloads, links and it’s dead easy to integrate.

We’re close to Devthought’s first anniversary too, which will mean an upgrade, a new design, and lots of new stuff. Stay tuned

I’m glad to announce that I’m working on the following updates, which will be here on Devthought in the next few weeks:

• WP-o-Matic Stable, with more than 15 bugfixes, and many of the promised features and some that readers suggested.
• SlideList 2.0 (aka Fancy Menu), more optimised than ever and now with free menu examples. Both vertical and horizontal, text or image based!
• More cool articles and tutorials!

Stay tuned