Hartley Brody

Yesterday, news broke that millions of encrypted LinkedIn passwords were leaked and posted on Russian website. And today, eHarmoney confirmed a password leak, and the popular music service last.fm just announced they’re investigating a similar leak.

Now is probably a good time to update the passwords on all of your accounts.

A lot has been written about how developers can secure their applications to keep their users’ information safe.

But what about the users themselves?

We all use dozens of password-protected services from Twitter and Facebook to corporate email and online banking. What can we do to help ensure no one else accesses our accounts?

Every single time you explain your startup to someone, you’re pitching it.

Or at least, you should be.

I was getting dinner a few nights ago with some other students. The group is a bunch of fledgling entrepreneurs at Bowdoin, much like myself, who meet every once in awhile to swap stories. I had been invited a few times, but this was the first night I was actually able to attend.

As I was preparing to head out, one of the guys mentioned he had an idea he wanted to run by me.

“Alright, let me hear the pitch,” I said, interested.

“Well, I haven’t worked on the pitch yet, but I can just tell you the basic–”

“That’s fine,” I cut him off, I was in a hurry. “Just let me hear what you have so far.”

Anyone who knows me knows that I love building stuff. And not only that, I subscribe strongly to the “do things, tell people” mantra, constantly sharing my projects with the world.

While this lifestyle has been super rewarding for me and has created a lot of great opportunities, one of my favorite consequences is that all sorts of people see me as a resource for advice.

Almost every week this semester, I’ve ended up grabbing lunch with someone I had never met who reached out and wanted to pick my brain. And I love it!

I’ve met a lot of great people with a lot of big ideas and I hope that I’ve been able to help them follow their dreams in some small way.

One of the trends I’ve noticed recently is that a lot of these conversations gravitate towards finding technical people.

It’s a well-known fact that there aren’t nearly enough coders to go around these days, and companies are doing all sorts of crazy things to win the war for talent.

But if all you have is an idea and no technical skills, what are you supposed to do?

I started learning Python 8 months ago as I was finishing up my awesome summer internship at HubSpot.

Before Python, I had spent a few years moonlighting as a self-taught PHP hacker tweaking wordpress layouts and reusing other people’s code. I consider Python the first language I’ve really learned how to use properly and effectively. But I know I still have a long way to go.

Using the language to solve problems isn’t hard. But using the language to solve problems effectively and elegantly was a struggle for me – it was hard to break out of my PHP hacker mindset. Do this, then do that, etc.

It took awhile before I really understood how to read a list comprehension, and I only recently wrote my first successful lambda function.

There is a great community around Python with tons of fantastic tutorials, but internalizing all that knowledge and thinking about problems like a true Pythonista proved challenging.

But I had a bit of an aha! moment the other night as I was reading Mark Pilgirm’s “Dive into Python” when he offered a great framework for thinking about problems in Python and writing more elegant code:

I posted an instagram photo to Facebook last week showing the books I’m currently reading. Most of them are tech related, but the one that seemed to draw the most attention was “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” a New York Times Best Seller by Ramit Sethi.

I stole the book from one of my roommates in Boston (thanks Liam!) after following Ramit’s IWTYTBR blog for some time.

Ramit’s advice is specifically tailored to college students and young adults. The book is literally a guide full of simple, no-nonsense ways to automate your finances (“set it and forget it!”), save a little extra and, well… get rich.

The book also offers a lot of tips on hustling in general. I used his scripts in the second chapter to negotiate a 50% increase in my credit card limit right before spring break, even after the representative on the phone said that she couldn’t authorize that much initially. Swag.

You should definitely check out his blog, and consider buying his book if you have any interest in managing your money efficiently (hint: that means everyone!)

It’s also important to note that this isn’t just for people who dream of being millionaires. Whether you’re trying to get rich, or just want to live a simple life doing what you enjoy and living comfortably, you’re going to be interacting with money whether you like it or not. You’re going to be making it and spending it and saving it and hopefully investing it. So regardless of your goals, it (literally) pays to know what you’re doing.

Privacy is one of the most contentious issues in the digital age – and it’s been in the news a lot the past few weeks. There was the recent Path address book scandal and then Google tracking Safari users on iOS and then the New York Times exposition on Target’s data collection, and how they were able to predict a girl was pregnant before even her parents knew, based on her shopping habits.

Every time a new “privacy scandal” like this emerges, people inevitably freak out. There are usually calls for some sort of reform or regulation, and the entity responsible for the “infringement” gets a PR black eye, and usually ends up apologizing and discontinuing the practice.

Onlookers wonder how a company could have ever thought it was acceptable to collect data in such a clandestine way. How could anyone think it’s okay to be so invasive!?

As marketers and developers, we’re expected to see a line in the sand between “acceptable” ways of collecting data, and those that are too shady. The problem is – no such line exists. Or rather, it’s only discovered when companies get publicly shamed for crossing it.

I wrote an article for Bowdoin’s Orient Express entitled “How To Get Hired in 2012.” Click here to read the whole piece on the Orient Express’s website. An excerpt is below.

It has become taboo to ask someone where they’re working after graduation these days, for fear that they won’t have an answer. It seems like the default is to not have a job.

A lot of people roll it up with pithy niceties: “It’s okay, I’ve always wanted to travel!” “I think I’m just going to spend a few months trying to figure out what I really want to do with my life.” But no matter how you slice it, the reality sucks — unemployment.

The world has changed in drastic and fundamental ways over the past few decades. Technology has made workers far more productive, wiping out entire industries in the process. People still refer to our current economic situation as “The Great Recession” or the “Jobless Recovery” as if, one day, we’ll finally make it “back to normal” and there will finally be jobs for everyone. People lament the current job market and hope that one day everything will work itself out.

But what if it never does?

While Twitter is growing increasingly popular amongst college students, it exists in a slightly awkward place for those of us heading out into the professional world.

Last night, before I went to bed, I wrote a short article about Google’s awesome online Python classes, posted the link on Hacker News, and then fell asleep.

When I woke up this morning, I was excited to find that the link had made it all the way to the front page, with hundreds of upvotes!

But as I read the comments on the HN thread, my excitement quickly turned to terror. People were having trouble accessing my site – the huge wave of traffic had knocked my server offline, and it had been down for a few hours!

It was so backed up that I couldn’t even SSH in, but eventually I was able to restart everything and get it all back online. I kept a nervous eye on my analytics as I tried to figure out what went wrong, and how to prevent this from happening again.

Whether you’re just starting to learn Python, or you’ve been working with it for awhile, take note.

The lovably geeky Nick Parlante – a Google employee and CS lecturer at Stanford – has written some awesomely succinct tutorials that not only tell you how you can use Python, but also how you should use Python. This makes them a fantastic resource, regardless of whether you’re just starting, or you’ve been working with Python for awhile.

The course also features six YouTube videos of Nick giving a lesson in front of some new Google employees. These make it feel like he’s actually there teaching you every feature and trick, and I’d highly recommend watching all of them as you go through the lessons. Some of the videos are longish (~50m) so this is something you want to do when you’re sitting down and focused.

And to really get your feet wet, there are also downloadable samples puzzles and challenges that go along with the lessons, so you can actually practice coding along with the Googlers in his class. They’re all pretty basic – most took me less than 5m – but they’re a great chance to practice what you’ve learned. Plus you get the satisfaction that comes with solving puzzles and successfully moving through the class.

Did I mention it’s all available online, for free?