Yes, I see lots of 503s in my Heroku logs :-( This is a pet project, so I don't wanna pay for it, which means you all probably have to live with this until the initial wave of traffic dies down again, sorry!
Oops sorry. I saw you had promo'ed your site in the comments of an earlier article about kids and programming that HN linked to. So, I just wanted to spread the word :)
Being the OP I have to say I hesitated a bit before adding the quote, which wasn't in the original version of the post. I've done a fair amount of reading on the Cuban revolution, and mostly agree with your assessment of Che. The actual quote reflected my mood at the time of writing though, so I still chose to include it. Disagreeing with someone on a majority of things, does not mean that I can't quote them on the ones where we do, does it?
Maybe not - but it reduces the clarity of your position. People will associate Che with what they associate him with - not the iota of character you try to embody with one of his quotes.
To expound on that a little bit - what kind of confusion would there be if I wrote a blog post about efficient systems and quoted Adolf Hitler?
Generally I used to jump around to whatever seemed suitable for the message - but generally getting people to follow you from one thought to another is the hardest part - don't make it harder on them.
You know, there was a reason that post was tagged "rant". It wasn't meant as a position on anything, just a little rambling on my private blog. I didn't expect it to be read by anyone except my few regular readers and am frankly quite surprised it showed up here. I do appreciate the input however.
I put together a website collecting links to various programming languages/environments specifically targeting children (if anybody wants to make a prettier stylesheet for it, let me know):
Generally I'd advise starting with something interactive and fun, like eToys or Mindstorms. After that a project like Hackety Hack, Löve or Processing might be a good bridge into more "serious" programming. Some people also seem to like the HTML and JavaScript approach, because the development environment (a browser) is available virtually everywhere and it has a very short feedback cycle. I'm not too convinced of that, but YMMV.
Once your kid has the basics down, possibilities are almost endless. There's a plethora of freely available books (legally), of which I compiled a small subset here:
I'm also involved in teaching Ruby courses on RubyLearning.org, and while definitely not targeted at 10 year olds, our core Ruby course should be doable for a motivated teenager willing to learn.
Whatever you do, I think the most important thing is to focus on the fun. If kids enjoy what they do, they can learn super fast and will happily come back for more :-)
