My Pull Quote in 'New York Magazine'

“I taught myself to code in the pre-boot-camp era,” Steve Harms, the head of curriculum at Dev Bootcamp, told me, “and the way I would get around getting stuck, is that’d I’d post to these horrible PHP forums … The answers were neither good, nor were they correct, nor were they kindly presented.” Stack Overflow ostensibly fixes this problem by turning coder advice into a Reddit-like thread, with up-votes, down-votes, and helpful snippets. No more lengthy arguments without a clear winner; thanks to Stack Overflow, the “best” solution to a given problem is — or should be — voted to the top.

I did some talking about how access to answer sites might be steering the technical population to dangerous regurgitation.

“The question you’re asking is one that educators have wrestled with since the Hellenic Age,” Harms noted at the beginning of our discussion. In the Phaedrus, Plato, writing as Socrates, complains of students that use the written word: “Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.” Plato, once you explained electricity, the computer, the internet, coding, and the modern economy to him, would not like Stack Overflow, which joins a long lineage of existentially perilous new innovations, beginning with writing and then, more recently, Google and Wikipedia

Also referenced the Phaedrus, thus amortizing my philosophy degree slightly.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/03/the-hidden-power-of-stack-overflow.html