With open-source, the world is at our fingertips.
What is different about the people who are considered the brightest, most famous, and most successful? An interesting book on the subject was written by Malcolm Gladwell — “Outliers: The Story of Success.” This book takes the reader on an intriguing path that reveals the unique opportunities several icons in the tech world had available to them at a young age, as well as discusses the importance of timing, our cultural backgrounds, and the meaning we find within our work. For example, Bill Gates at age 13 was given access to a computer (a rare opportunity at the time) and learned the programming language BASIC. As a personal example, while certainly not an icon, I was lucky enough to have been supplied with an IBM computer in the early 1980s when I was in 4th grade and was motivated to learn to write video games. It was this that propelled me towards my engineering career. As there is likely an early endeavor or experience that shaped you as well, think about was this was and how instrumental this was in your life. Simply, people who put in 10,000 hours of work at a younger age have a much greater chance of great success.
What is different between our opportunities now and those just twenty years ago is the contrast between readily available resources. Much of this has been made possible by open-source platforms that are combined with our computing resources. Just a generation ago, the areas we might be exposed to and the resources we had available were highly dependent upon our culture, our families background, and in many cases the chance of where and when we were born. Now, a high percentage of our population has amazing resources available to them, can legally use powerful software packages, and our findings can easily be shared with the world. However, in order to take advantage of these opportunities, we first need to know that they exist and how to utilize them.
Opportunities for our children
From the perspective of a parent, I believe our kids have never had more opportunities to become masters of concepts that will later change the world. As far as a few inspirational ideas I use within my house:
- I’ve found it highly empowering to work together with my grade-schooler on Blender, making Minecraft-inspired animations. For those familiar with the characters of Minecraft, there is little more pleasing than bringing a creeper to life, giving it some personality, and putting some sound effects to it. Blender is a very challenging platform to learn, but there are amazing tutorials available, in which the teachings can be easily applicable to the particular piece of content you wish to make.
- Videos, tutorials, and video blogs can easily be made with OBS Studio, teaching our kids to become familiar and comfortable speaking and creating content about whatever inspires them.
- Open Shot is equivalent to some of the best video editors of several years ago. While I don’t necessarily recommend minors making their content public, they can safely share their creations, video gaming conquests, stories, and adventures (potentially dubbed over with music) with relatives all over the world.
- While not all free but typically affordable, the availability of teaching materials is enormous. Khan Academy is well known and frequently used in my house, but for more advanced materials, for a small fee every month, classes offered by world-class experts can be found through sources such as Coursera, Master Class, and LinkedIn.
- Perhaps not as pure as the prior ideas, Roblox deserves a mention. This is a framework that allows kids (and potentially adults) to play thousands of games for free, in which these games are created by the users. This is the novelty of Roblox, as the money made by the games is also shared with the creators. This allows kids to not only learn to create their own games, but also to have feedback as to how well their game is received.
Coming back to the ideas presented in Outliers, that there has never been a better time for our youth to be able to immerse themselves in extremely high-quality content that will propel them to the next level. However, as parents, we need to act as mentors. Our kids are not likely to stumble into these platforms by themselves, but will likely will need to be introduced. When opportunities present themselves to take up a project with your children and give them tools they can run with, take the opportunity!
Commercial software
Motivated by financial reasons and large armies of salespeople, private software platforms are commonly taught within universities. Within the engineering field, these platforms include Matlab, SolidWorks, and increasingly National Instruments LabVIEW. Due to students being educated on these platforms and then bringing this to industry, these platforms have become heavily relied upon within industry. However, if you’re in a small company, starting a company on your own, or just trying to learn a new skillset, the cost may be prohibitively high or the limitations of the educational versions simply too great. Examples of the pricing, at the time of this post, one license to Matlab is $2150, which does not include Simulink (an additional $3250) nor the tool kits that make Matlab valuable. This range of pricing is typical for most engineering software platforms, and purchasing licenses for multiple platforms becomes expensive very quickly. In my opinion, the subscription models being offered by many software packages are a step in the right direction, but they still act as barriers to entry that slow innovation.
Parallels with the academic paper system
While I understand the need to protect the hard work and significant costs spent developing software and continue to provide financial incentives to create great software, these needs should be balanced with the benefits of allowing the public to innovate. Similar to open-source, the system that I have great respect for is the academic paper and conference system. This system is arguably responsible for much of the tremendous progress made over the last several hundred years. The ideas of early contributors such as James Joule, Lord Kelvin, and Isaac Newton have continued to be built upon to this day. In the academic paper system, ideas are shared which become the foundation for new ideas, while creators, scientists, and inventors are credited for their great work. In the open-source community, the software is available, contribution is sought after, and credit is provided. This is all while providing the foundations that allow our communities to work together and our shared ideas to sprout and grow.
Open-source tools
The number of open-source projects is far too large to cover. However, just to provide examples of a few areas that have led to tremendous progress, consider the programming language Python. We no longer need expensive proprietary compilers to implement our programs. Building upon this are many examples, but several include the way we share our work. Jupyter notebook allows computational code and explanatory text to be easily combined and shared. GitHub has been indispensable in managing nearly every open-source project but also making it easy to collaborate and share with others. Built within Python are APIs and packages that interface with nearly all available tools, commercial or open-source. Available as open-source are tools such as TensorFlow and PyTorch which have led to tremendous advances in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. When these ideas and tools are combined with cloud computing and near infinite computational power, the possibilities are limitless.
This leaves us with a teenager that is now capable of learning incredibly advanced topics from their bedroom, while also being able to contribute their learnings and work into GitHub for the world to see. It leaves us with tools that allow you to easily make content, videos, and wrappers for complex software packages, which can allow your creativity to flow unimpeded. In summary, when looking to expand your skillsets, your children’s skillsets, when looking for a solution to a problem, or if you are a developer and want to make a real difference by setting a foundation for others, consider exploring open-source.
