I endured this torture for two years, two different teachers and stacks of booklets trying to teach vocabulary – which were all lost on me. I do however specifically remember a good friend of mine picking the language up like crazy. She went on to take advanced French, visit the country with a class and eventually speak the language fluently. So I’m not blaming the system for my failures, it clearly works for some people. I’m actually quite jealous of people who took the opportunity to learn a language as a young person, because I’m convinced it’s significantly easier and much stickier in your brain.

A year ago September I had the opportunity to attend a technology conference in Berlin, and having never spent any time in Europe I thought to myself “When in Rome”. So I found myself some German language learning software and started at the very beginning. At this point, no one had told me that German is an obscenely hard language to learn. And after two months for an hour a day, I got on a plane and flew to Berlin. I immediately landed and jumped into a cab where I used the 5 German words I knew, and then listened to him speak in lightening speed German for the next 20 minutes of the ride (and I understood absolutely nothing). At that point it was painfully clear that in two months you can’t even learn enough of a language to properly talk to a foreign pet gerbil.

See languages are funny, they aren’t like anything else you learn – they are a magical combination of thinking and specifically not thinking – and that’s where the journey begins. My most important realization was when I realized that English was easy to me, because I never knew anything else. English is my Operating System, and I have been running it for 27 years – other people have been learning, evolving and using their language for years and years and years. How could I possibly be short sighted enough to think I could make any kind of usable progress in two months? I dunno, I’ve learned programming languages in less time.

Here’s how a language works:

Another way I like to envision it is that you start with this giant blurry photo of all the possible phrases, cultural understanding’s, vocabulary, and slowly overtime they become clearer and clearer until enough of them touch that you can identify pieces of the photo. The best thing about this metaphor is that when you look at the photo, you don’t think about each piece — your brain does all the heavily lifting automatically to help you identify the context of the photo.

As the human brain is so amazingly good at pattern recognition — you don’t actually require a super high percentage of clarity to know that this is a picture of a guy hiking in the woods next to a lake and a mountain.

So instead of giving up when I got back from Berlin, I kept at it — for another 11 months and as I built up more vocabulary — I tried as hard as possible to expose myself to new instances of the language. Each time I felt like I knew nothing, wrote down words and noted epiphanies. I must say, it really helps having people around who speak the language that you can ask questions. So much of a language is context and culture.

One of the most ground breaking parts of my learning experience was the discovery of music and television media that interested me in the language. (Go find yourself a native speaker and rack their brain). Starting with good music – because when you don’t even realize it’s happening, your brain is setting up patterns in your head that you will be shocked by later. Secondly, watching TV and movies really helps with an understanding of the flow of a language. As I found one of early, more difficult parts of learning was knowing when one word stopped and another began. We take our mother tongue for granted, we know where to expect pauses and have heard word combinations so many times that we know what to expect to come next.

Each word needs an enforcing moment, I’ve heard some people say – repeat it to yourself 3 times. Others say, correlate it with another concept as a mnemonic device. I actually found the best way to learn a word was to use it wrong, and get corrected. The simple moment of being embarrassed solidifies that word into your brain. And the only way for that to happen, is for you to go out there and try to speak to others that know the language. This is perhaps the most difficult part for me, as I prefer to practice presentations 5 times before I get on stage.

A helpful tip I found was to not attempt the translation of every word you hear, because you can never do that fast enough to understand a spoken paragraph (and it just makes you want to give up altogether). You have to just let the words pass through your brain, and over time you will realize that you understand more and more of what is being said. When you experience that for the first time, it’s pretty magnificent. I first noticed it after watching an episode of Family Guy – I walked into the kitchen pondering and forgot which language the episode had been in. I went back to the TV and found that the whole thing had been in German and inside my brain I had a full understanding of the episode void of any language attachment.

Don’t be afraid to fail, when kids first learn a language — they say things wrong constantly, and their parents constantly correct them. So why as we get older do we have such a hard time with being corrected? I see it in myself, but have grown to appreciate the effort in other people trying to help me out. This tip is specific to German, but don’t mix up “mich” and “mir” – man, they really don’t like that one. I suggest spending a couple extra weeks just working on using those two correctly. I specifically remember trying to practice my German one night here in San Francisco with a visitor from Munich, who politely, but firmly said “Please speak English to me, you may want to consider giving up on German”. And again, in Berlin where a German native said “Why would you want to learn German, you speak English right?”.

So this September a group of friends and I visited Munich and had a native German tour guide (now living in SF) to show us the Bavarian way. We spent some time at the Oktoberfest tents and touring the city – which was great fun. And I have to say, I’m quite happy that I didn’t give up because there were some moments of incredible satisfaction in my ability to communicate at least a little bit in another language. There was also a moment where I was faced with demonstrating my German language skills to a 6 year old that speaks 4 languages — I was terrified and my language skills reverted to the level of a kindergartner.

Some people would still say, “why learn another language?” – and I’m not going to try to convince anyone that it’s something they need to go out and do. However, I must say that it has exercised and affected my brain in ways that I don’t think I have ever experienced before. I have noticed that when I start to pay attention to a German song, or watch a German show that it literally feels like my brain is stretching. It’s an amazing sensation like nothing I have ever felt before, and recently for a few minutes everyday my brain has started to crave it. I think it’s easiest to compare to working out at the gym – it can be painful, but rewarding, and stretching afterwards “hurts so good”. And once you get into a routine – you start to feel a little out of sync when you don’t do it. I have noticed my memory has improved, and my problem solving abilities at work have received a boost. But the most interesting thing is that now I notice all kinds of things in the world around me that I never would have. A large percentage of the English language is heavily based on German, and I have a totally new understanding of why we say things the way we do.

I am currently taking a conversational German class at the Geothe Institute in San Francisco – and I must say it was a bit terrifying to walk in there with no academic backround in the language. But it was inexpensive, no pressure and has turned out to be a great experience.

Anyone with an interest in learning a language can do it – but I would urge you to seriously consider the size of the feat you are tackling. To really “learn” a language you have to make a serious time investment, but the more you put in – the more satisfying the experience can become.

I feel like I have just begun.

And remember.. some cultures are easier to get into than others. You can tell that I had a really rough time – but, “When in Rome”…

The opening party was populated with people dressed in amazingly authentic looking pirate costumes, many with a full size macaw parrot on their shoulder of differing and impressive colors. This party was sponsored by  Zappos, included a great pirate band, many fantastic local beers and they simultaneously ran a super fun twitter based prize contents. Towards the end of the night I won one of their awesome prize bags, which included an 8 bit green gameboy pocket (with tetris, super mario and metroid 2). This brilliant little old game device has been receiving a lot of attention at my house this week, somehow it is still incredibly addicting and fun to play. Way to go Zappos! I will continue buying nearly all my clothes through you..

At 11am the next morning I had 45 minutes to announce and show off Jellyfish, which is a project I have been working on for the last few months. The goal of the project is to expose a simple API allowing you to run JavaScript in many different environments at once. In regards to my talk I did two stupid things: 1. I waited to record my demo’s until I arrived in Portland, 2. I waited to record my demo’s until after a beer tasting pirate party. Having said that, I think the talk went incredibly well and I have been really enjoying the responses and ideas I have received from the community.. keep it coming! I was happy to see a follow up talk filling in the bits my talk wasn’t able to. Matthew Eernissee talked about the pitfalls of writing JavaScript to be shared in multiple environments and gave Jellyfish a nice little plug.

I was thrilled to get a chance to hang out with some of the old OSAF gang, @towns, @twleung (who did two great writeups of JSConf and NodeConf), @mde, and @mikeal. It was interesting to hear all the different views on the attention explosion JavaScript has been experiencing over the last couple years, since we all worked on Cosmo — to this day Cosmo still has one of the most dynamic and interesting web based UI’s I can think of.

I’m glad to say that I was at the talk when Batman came to visit (batman.js) in order to help clear the conference of any potential criminals. I was also at the Yammer party with the great 80′s band where there was a Firefox running around. But the most interesting part of the whole experience was listening to the banter about where the future of the language should go. With Node.js doing it’s thing, people are using and seeing JavaScript in a totally different way. This has started to create different needs and expectations that didn’t really exist when JS development lived only on the client side. There are multiple different communities coming together to create this new “JavaScript Community” and watching them collide is sort of like witnessing plate tectonics from space. Each of the collisions creates a interesting new rift, or subduction zone in the mantel of the community.

One thing I can say for sure is that, you either get CoffeeScript, or you don’t — either way, I think it’s fair to say that we will continue seeing more and more ways for people to write JavaScript without writing Javascript.. and those people can get off my lawn.

If I had to pick a couple statements that sum up the crazy, amazing, drunken “JavaScript Community”, I would have to quote the two icons ultimately responsible for the happenings of last week. The first would be Bredan Eich explaining that “Javascript was thrown together to avoid other languages winding up in the browser” and that he’s aware that it isn’t an “ideal language syntactically”. The second being Ryan Dahl explaining that he’s not really a big fan of JavaScript, it is ” simply adequate for the need”, and he “hates callbacks”. Fortunately, both of these guys and the surrounding community leaders are all on the same page. Javascript is where it is because of it’s fortune of being “the browser platform”. We can all agree that as a language  there are a lot of improvements that can be made in harmony, I just hope that doesn’t mean that JS is going to turn into CoffeeScript.

The other unrelated thing I learned while at JSConf was that John Resig left Mozilla to build the community at the Khan Academy. I had never heard of the Khan Academy before, but I think it’s fair to say that I will probably re-learn everything I learned in college and more watching his videos over the next few years. Sounds like an awesome gig, and I wish him the best — I did find his Reddit AMA kind of amusing and totally bizarre – Mozilla is going to miss him.

I wish I had time to write an overview of all the JSConf talks, but to sum it all up quite crudely: Cloud9 and skywriter are the bomb, I think we will see more “learn how to program” tools in the browser with JS in the future (which is great) like waterbear. Also, apparently people care about putting JS on mobile devices — who knew?

As for NodeConf — this community knows that it needs to mature, and fast — so there was a huge emphasis on how to run big production systems on node, how to debug it and how to test it. I can’t wait to see the fallout from that day of collaboration.

I wanted to thank everyone for the great input on what I’m working on, and the ideas and feedback for Sauce Labs — I am taking all of it very seriously and am working on turning them into action items. For those of you two simply told me that you love Sauce and to keep doing what we are doing — I appreciate the boost!

Also,  I cannot forget a huge thanks to @voodootikigod, @mikeal and all the folks involved in running those conferences, I had a great time — thanks for inviting me to speak!

I took a lot of amazing photos, and I will be going through those this weekend – so stay tuned for a link to the photo album. And if you missed my Jellyfish talk, I will be doing it again at this years Open Source Bridge – June 21-24 back up in Portland, OR.

See you all at TXJS and JSEU, and maybe tonight at the San Francisco JavaScript Pub Night!

See the thing is, right out of college I started fooling with raw DOM, cross browser event firing and capturing and building pretty big cool projects without the help and support of jQuery. So I developed this sick enjoyment of writing tons of raw uninhibited, IE 6 destroying JS. And ever since then, I have just thought of server side code as a necessary evil that I would PREFER someone else to write for me. Don’t even get me started on databases, I mean really — it’s hard to find software more out of touch with the web than traditional databases.

Anyways, so over and over I have pulled the git repo for Node, built it (a couple times had to Google error messages and change things to get it to succeed). Then I would get a ‘hello world’ working, and promptly close the terminal window and head back to my current Django based project (or close that terminal too and head back to client side JS). See, all along I just wanted to store my data on the client side and have some magic behind the scenes take that data and replicate it to a DB somewhere that I don’t need to know about. The point is that, Node wasn’t that magic and ‘hello world’ didn’t really feel that JavaScripty to me. I mean where is my ‘window’ object? And wtf is up with having to ‘require’ modules? I never got into client side ‘require’, so this concept is relatively foreign to me.

At JS.eu I started hacking on a node app, because I simply felt like a poser attending that conference and having not written much in Node. Honestly, minus a couple HTML 5 talks and some JavaScript icons like Crockford and Brendan Eich, JS.eu could easily have been called NodeConf.eu and no one would have really blinked. So I copied an Express app, got it to do some mundane simple tasks then tried to move to the next level. I got stuck due to some strange behavior that wound up being attributed to variable hoisting. At this point I put Node back in the drawer, see when I use a new technology I really want an impressive ‘hell world’ in less than 2 hours (without reading more than 20 minutes of docs). You may be thinking “wow that’s some serious impatience”, but I would be very surprised if I’m all that different than anyone else’s patience tolerance.

Finally about a month ago, I was about to dive into a new app using Django when @mikeal convinced me to use Node and put it on a no.de smart machine. After provisioning my no.de smart machine I was completely and utterly confused and frustrated. After a handful of questions @mikeal pointed me to: Countdown to Knockout: Post 11 – Deploying to Joyent which (although there have been some changes) made it clear enough that I could get my little app online and usable.

Once you have a working web app, the next evolution is to actually store data somewhere, and as I said before: “I am not a fan of traditional DB technology”. So naturally continuing the conversation landed me at Countdown to Knockout: Post 14 – Using CouchDB with node.js. In my ultimate laziness I couldn’t even be bothered to setup CouchDB on my Joyent smart machine, so I decided to use my CouchOne instance. Then I realized, the “CLOUD” buzz word, actually means; how many people can I pay to put my stuff on their machine? I wish I could also do my testing in the CLOUD, oh wait, you can, and I work there, see Sauce Labs.

So my main point is that for the last six months, Node.JS has been this very interesting swimming pool that I kept dipping my toes into — but it finally reached a reasonable temperature for me to dive in, swim around and discover a whole world (including mermaids like socket.io). Node isn’t awesome because it’s JavaScript, it’s awesome because it fits very nicely into this new development ecosystem where things feel like they are designed for the web. After I recognized the differences between Node and my client side JS habits, I was able to move back and forth between client and server side code without this painful mental context switch I normally experience  with syntax. It makes me hate server side development way less than I did in the past, and combined with CouchDB we find ourselves in a world where JSON is the native tongue.

Node may not be _the_ future of technology, but I sure see it playing an important role in my future, enabling faster application development. </rant>