Bringing tech jobs to the mountains
Everybody remembers U.S. President Trump promising to bring back jobs to the coal mining towns that had been hit hard by job losses. Sadly, his administration has not been able to stem the tide that was an inevitable result of shifting energy consumption towards natural gas, increased reliance on renewables, high costs for coal generation and a slow growth in electricity demand.
The U.S. has seen decades of a slowly declining coal industry. Between 2012–2017 it shut down approximately 50 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity. In some counties, especially those sitting deep within the Appalachian Mountains (i.e. Kentucky), up to 94% of coal jobs were lost between 2011 and 2016.
Within coal mining itself, there was a revolution at the heart of so much change experienced within the industry. It came in the form of long-wall mining, where slices or ‘panels’ of a mine wall (up to 3.6 kilometres long) are extracted by hydraulically run machines in an entirely mechanised process.
Coal miner-turned-coder, Marvin Laucher, had first-hand experience of how long-wall mining revolutionised productivity and safety.
“This operation is protected by a series of hydraulic roof supports which prevent the mine roof from collapsing by applying huge pressures to support the rock above,” Marvin explains.
“Each roof support is capable of independent movement, so once the shearer has passed by, the support can lower itself away from the roof and advance forward to fill the space left by the shearer. In this way the roof support system maintains a safe haven for the miners and their equipment to operate in, all the time moving forward as the coal seam is mined and allowing for a controlled collapse of the roof.”
The most influential digital tech that was introduced to the system was remote guidance technology, which plots the equipment’s position in three dimensions. The elements of increased safety and productivity completely changed the coal mining industry, as well as providing miners with increased exposure to tech and conceptual processes that drive tech forward.
“Learning the tools of coal mining helped me develop critical thinking skills,” says Marvin. “The machinery is very high tech and requires a great deal of skill to be able to operate safely and efficiently. When working in coal mining you are constantly faced with challenges that have to be broken down and solved just like with software challenges.”
Faced with the pressures of a shrinking industry, Marvin saw the writing on the wall for his own job. Speaking to his sister, Amanda Laucher, who is a technology consultant, Marvin was unsure how a career in tech was possible within his own county. Amanda saw a need for greater transparency and access to skills within tech, and so started Mined Minds with her husband, Jonathan Graham.
What Amanda saw was a lack of tech jobs in the Appalachian region, despite many people she talked to already displaying strong programming skills or at the least, the conceptual mindsets that would apply well to coding. But alongside this dearth of tech jobs in the region, there has been a national software skills shortage identified in the U.S. (1.4 million unfilled development jobs by 2020, as identified by the U.S. Department of Labor).
Mined Minds tasked itself with bringing some of those jobs to the mountains, and providing an avenue for those in the Appalachian regions to learn coding skills without having to quit their jobs to undergo full-time study or become heavily in debt to acquire a new qualification.
With Marvin as their initial source for inspiration, Amanda and Jonathan built a large network of connections between various counties, establishing a program that teaches the fundamentals of coding, breaking down problems and instilling the principles of agile development by grouping programmers together and focussing on approaches such as short cycle development and TDD.
Marvin now works for Mined Minds and is becoming a strong advocate for the role tech can play in transitioning entire communities towards new industries, potentially saving people from having to leave Appalachian areas due to the decline of coal mining.
Speaking at FullStackNYC in May this year, Marvin is focusing on the connection that is evident between long-wall mining and serverless programming.
“The reason behind serverless computing’s growth in popularity is simple: it requires no infrastructure management. Organizations no longer have to provision, scale or manage any servers in order run code, and developers only need to write the code needed to complete the task while a third party, like AWS Lambda or Microsoft Azure Functions, handles all the capacity, scaling and patching needed to run that code.
“Serverless computing relieves developers of the burden of worrying about server management, freeing up their time to focus on the core product and creating value for an organization. It also increases developer efficiency by reducing the amount of time needed to test and run the code. Like long-wall mining, efficiency is key and directly goes back to the bottom line. With mining, it’s about getting the coal out in the most efficient way. With serverless, you can now just focus on the code and get your project out to your clients even faster.”
Head to FullStackNYC to hear Marvin talk about serverless programming. 👍 For news and articles from Skills Matter, subscribe to our newsletter here.
