Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

Hackers

September 4, 2014 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

It was almost dawn outside Lincoln and Edmunds halls, and the clicking of laptop keys on a Saturday morning had slowed to a persistent few. Three students slept in chairs in the Edmunds lobby, one next to a lone coder at his keyboard. In the Lincoln lobby, a quilt lay seemingly abandoned in a clump on the floor. Then it moved, and the petite student who had been slumbering beneath it climbed into a chair and disappeared under the quilt again.

Upstairs, John Verticchio ’15 looked around the windowless room where he’d spent the night working with three friends. “Is the sun up yet?” he asked.

Welcome to the 5C Hackathon, the all-nighter that lures as many as 250 students from The Claremont Colleges each semester to stay up building creative and often elaborate software projects and apps in a mere 12-hour span. It is a deadline-driven, energy-drink-fueled rush to create something that just might become a Silicon Valley startup but is more likely to be remembered as one of those crazily fun things people do in college when they are alight with intelligence and passion.

The event is student-created and student-led, built from scratch by three Pomona College students in 2012 with a budget of $1,000 and 30 participants. By the fifth 5C Hackathon in April, the budget had grown to $13,000 and the semiannual event had drawn sponsors that have included Intuit, Google and Microsoft. The codefest also is supported by Claremont McKenna’s Silicon Valley Program, which helps students of The Claremont Colleges spend a sort of “semester abroad,” studying while interning at a technology company in Northern California.

The 5C Hackathon is a one-night gig. Competitors are allowed to come in with an idea in mind, but “the rules are that you have to start from scratch. You’re not allowed to have pre-written code,” said Kim Merrill ’14, one of the three co-founders. “It’s all about learning, having fun, staying up all night. It’s not a heavy competition.”

As students wandered into the Seaver North Auditorium around 7 on a Friday night, Merrill, who will go to work for Google as a software engineer in the fall, sat on a table in front wearing shorts and a green H5CKATHON t-shirt as hip music played on the audio system.

The aspiring hackers—how odd that a term that once referred to computer criminals has become a compliment—carried backpacks and laptops, sleeping bags and pillows, the occasional stuffed animal and Google swag bags holding USB chargers, blue Google knit caps and Lego-like toys in boxes emblazoned with the words “google.com/jobs.” This looked like serious fun, and contrary to the stereotypical image of computer geeks, there were women everywhere.

“Having Kim leading the whole thing, I think, has been really powerful for that,” said Jesse Pollak ’15, a former Pomona student who was visiting Claremont for the event he co-founded with Merrill and Brennen Byrne ’12 before leaving school last year to join Byrne in founding a Bay Area startup. (Clef, a mobile app, replaces user passwords on websites with a wave of your smartphone and has been featured by The New York Times.)

“I came in my first year and I knew I wanted to study computer science, and I was hoping there would be, like, a scene here for people who like building stuff, and there wasn’t then. There was nothing,” said Pollak, who didn’t start coding until his senior year in high school. “So I started trying to track down people who were interested in that sort of thing.”

He found them in Byrne and in Merrill, who had planned to be an English major but started coding after an introductory computer science class as a freshman at Pomona.

The event they founded gave the 5Cs an early start on what has now become a national phenomenon. “Hackathons were a new thing and most were on large campuses,” Merrill said.

Hackathons have exploded into prominence in the last two years. The second LA Hacks competition at UCLA in April drew more than 4,000 registrants from universities that included UCLA, USC, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Harvard for a 36-hour event it touted as a “5-star hacking experience” with VIP attendees. Civic groups and government organizations have gotten into the act, too, with the second National Day of Civic Hacking on May 31 and June 1 featuring events in 103 cities, many focused on building software that could help improve communities and government.

While some hackathons have gone grander and glitzier—MHack at the University of Michigan awarded a $5,000 first prize this year and HackMIT drew 1,000 competitors to compete for $14,000 in prizes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year—the 5C Hackathon has remained doggedly itself. “We really wanted, instead of pushing for bigger things, to think about how we can get more people into this,” Pollak said. “You’ll see people present (projects) in the morning who didn’t know how to code at the beginning of the week and who actually built something. It’ll be small and ugly, but it will work.”

A centerpiece of the 5C Hackathon is “Hack Week,” a free beginners’ course of four two-hour evening tutorials leading up to the event, with students teaching other students such basics as HTML and CSS, JavaScript, jQuery and MongoDB, all of it an alphabet soup to the uninitiated.

Christina Tong ’17 tried her first hackathon the fall of her freshman year, picking up ideas during Hack Week that helped inspire her team to fashion a restaurant-ordering app for the Coop Fountain. This spring, continuing to teach themselves more programming languages with online tutorials, her team built a financial tracking system called Money Buddy.

It’s the “forced deadline” of a hackathon, Tong said, that helps coders power through the inevitable snags and bugs of building a program. Pressing on is a huge part of the task. “When you’re fresh, you could probably figure out those bugs decently quickly, but around 3 o’clock, it’s past your normal bedtime and you’re staring for hours at things you probably could fix when you’re fresh,” she said.

Tong’s strategy is catnaps and sustenance. The spring 5C Hackers got an 11 p.m. food truck visit and a snack spread featuring clementines, jelly beans, Oreos, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, bananas and a veggie tray. And at 3 a.m., just because it’s tradition, Merrill—who typically spends much of the night mentoring beginning teams—rallied the students for a two-minute, middle of the night campus run. “It can be hard to motivate people to run at 3 a.m.,” she said.

By 4 a.m., someone had scrawled a message on a whiteboard dotted with listings for tutors: “Countdown 4 hours!”

Some didn’t make it—“I think we lost a lot more teams than we usually do,” Merrill said—but by mid-morning Saturday, 30 teams of two to four people had made one-minute slam demonstrations of their completed projects, roughly half beginners and half advanced.

Judged by America Chambers, a Pomona visiting assistant professor of computer science, and representatives of some of the sponsoring tech companies—this could be the new model of campus recruiting—the entries included efforts such as 5Cribs and the Cyborg Dorm Chooser, designed to help students pick the best dormitory rooms or suites for them.

There was a Craigslist-type site exclusively for The Claremont Colleges and an app to help recreational athletes find a pickup game on campus. One called Expression uses a webcam and face recognition to automatically select music that seems to fit the user’s mood. Another named Echo was a message-in-a-bottle app that allows people to leave audio messages for strangers that can only be heard when the person is standing near the same spot.

The Drinx app suggests cocktail combinations based on what ingredients are in the fridge. But the winning advanced project—sense a theme here?—was the Shotbot, a boxlike robot controlled by a Siri hack that makes mixed drinks automatically. Nonalcoholic, for demonstration purposes.

“Siri loves to serve drinks,” the familiar voice said after taking an order.

“We definitely used it at parties the next few weeks,” said Sean Adler, Claremont McKenna ’14, who built the project, using Arduino, Python, iOS and Node.js, along with three other Claremont McKenna computer science students—brothers Joe and Chad Newbry, both ’14, and Remy Guercio ’16. Their prize? Each team member received an iPad2.

The winners in the beginners’ division, Matt Dahl, Patrick Shao, Ziqi Xiong and John Kim—all Pomona ’17—won Kindle Fires for their project, a “confessions” site similar to other popular sites that allow people to post anonymous secrets or desires. The Pomona students added several features—systems for sorting posts, marking favorites and for hiding offensive content, often a concern on confessions sites.

The next 5C Hackathon will be in the fall, but with Merrill’s graduation in May—she was working for the nonprofit Girls Who Code in San Francisco during the summer before starting at Google in Seattle in late September—the three founders have left Pomona. Andy Russell ’15, Aloke Desai ’16 and Ryan Luo ’16, all of whom helped organize and competed in the spring hackathon, will return to stage more all-night programming binges, the tradition now entrenched.

Russell, his night of coding done, walked out into the quiet of an early Saturday morning, unable to make it to the presentations. He had a Frisbee tournament at 8.

Code

September 4, 2014 by Mark Wood Comments Off

This is surely a first, so (cue the trumpet fanfare) welcome to the first editor’s letter ever written in code.

Not all of it, of course—as you can tell from the simple fact that you’re reading this. But in an issue on the theme of “code,” in addition to articles about genetic code and computer code and decoding animal calls, there had to be something about the clandestine side of the word. But alas, try as I might, I was unable to unearth a single Pomona source for a story about ciphers. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose, since the world of cryptology is, by its very nature, a secretive one.

So to fill that void, please forgive me for offering this light-hearted tutorial on a subject I’ve found intriguing ever since my secret decoder ring childhood.

Each paragraph below demonstrates a different cipher, and—don’t say I didn’t warn you—the codes get progressively harder as they go along. There are instructions in each paragraph to help you translate the next, but if you want to play along, you’ll have to work for it.

We’ll start with one of the oldest and simplest of codes—the Caesar cipher, named for the great Roman himself, who used it in his letters. In this substitution cipher, each letter is replaced by another a fixed number of letters up or down the alphabet. Once you figure out that number, the rest is easy.

Ecguct ekrjgtu ctg ejknf’u rnca vq fgeqfg, dwv vjga ctg cnuq vjg dcuku qh eqorngz eqfgu nkmg vjg Xkpgig`tg ekrjgt, kp yjkej c yqtf rtqxkfgu vjg mga hqt ownvkrng Ecguct ekrjgtu kp c tqvcvkpi ugswgpeg. Vjg pgzv rctcitcrj, hqt gzcorng, wugu “CDE” cu kvu mga. Vjwu, vjg hktuv ngvvgt ku qpg ngvvgt qhh, vjg ugeqpf vyq qhh, vjg vjktf vjtgg qhh, vjgp dcem vq qpg, cpf uq qp.

Sfb Ugkdeb`qc tzq qgmrffq sm yd skapbzixajb, asq hl zqwmsmdqymgw, qgmpd yod dxlmrr jxrr tnpar. Red mkkw qqsix skapbzixajb bgmgco hq qgc “lmc-qhkb oya,” vffbf rrcp zl bmrfqc qdvq zq x jcv. Sm adalcc, vns ptzqqyzs red lrlcohaxk txksb nd bzae kcqsco hl qgc hdw (X dorzjp ycon; X bpsxkq 25) cqmj sfb dorhtxkcks jbsrbq gk sfb lcprydd. Yac 26 rl zlv mcdzrfuc odqrkr. Ffllqc poyzdq xmb mtlzssxsglm, uehae zpb ccidrbc gk qcxk alcca lcpryddq xmwtzw. Qgc hdw edpb hq qgc chpps nxqydqymg mc sffr jbsrbq.

Bm ggc’nw wfqp rhna wsk qcw gyla fx rm ucxknghjd sc ysogg mw b of. Zs hweykewceokaarl.

And with that, welcome to the wonderful world of code.

///////////////////////////////

Stray Thoughts (decoded)

Here is the plain text of the three enciphered paragraphs in the Stray Thoughts:

[Caesar Cipher:]
Caesar ciphers are child’s play to decode, but they are also the basis of complex codes like the Vinegère cipher, in which a word provides the key for multiple Caesar ciphers in a rotating sequence. The next paragraph, for example, uses “ABC” as its key. Thus, the first letter is one letter off, the second two off, the third three off, then back to one, and so on.

[Vinegére Cipher:]
The Vinegère was thought to be unbreakable, but in cryptography, those are famous last words. The only truly unbreakable cipher is the “one-time pad,” which uses an entire text as a key. To decode, you subtract the numerical value of each letter in the key (A equals zero; Z equals 25) from the equivalent letter in the message. Add 26 to any negative result. Ignore spaces and punctuation, which are deleted in real coded messages anyway. The key here is the first paragraph of this letter.

[One-Time Pad Cipher:]
If you’ve come this far, you must be as intrigued by codes as I am. So congratulations.

Alumni Awards for 2014

September 4, 2014 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2014

The Blaisdell Distinguished Alumni Award honors alumni for achievement in their professions or community service, particularly those who have lived up to the quotation from James A. Blaisdell which is inscribed into the gates of the College: “They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.” This year, there are three winners:

Ifeanyi “Tony” Menkiti’64 taught philosophy at Wellesley College for 40 years and is the author off our collections of poetry: Before a Common Soil (2007), Of Altair, the Bright Light (2005), The Jubilation of Falling Bodies (1978), and Affirmations (1971). He is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, the nation’s oldest continuous all-poetry bookshop.

Born in Onitsha, Nigeria, he came to Pomona in 1961 on the ASPAU program (African Scholar-ship Program of American Universities). After Pomona, he attended Columbia University Pulitzer School of Journalism, New York University and Harvard University. In 1975, he received a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts State Council on the Arts and Humanities, followed in 1978 by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his collections, his poems have appeared in Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New Directions, The Massachusetts Review and other publications.

In 1996, he received the Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Wellesley College.

Joe Palca’74 has been a science correspondent for National Public Radio since 1992. He has covered a range of topics, from biomedical research to astronomy, and is currently focused on the series, Joe’s Big Idea, which explores the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors.

Palca began his career in 1982 as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington,D.C. In 1986, he began a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first with Nature and then with Science Magazine. In 2009, he took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

Palca has won numerous awards for his work,including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).

A psychology major at Pomona, he later earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology.

Rip Rapson’74 is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a national, private foundation based in Detroit. Since 2006, he has led Kresge in developing programs in arts and culture, education, environment, health,human services and the renewal of Detroit, distributing approximately $150 million annually.

Rapson was a political science major at Pomona, graduating magna cum laude. After at-tending Columbia Law School, he joined the Minneapolis law firm of Leonard, Street and Deinard. He was recruited in 1989 to become the deputy mayor of Minneapolis under Mayor Don Fraser, and was primary architect of the pioneering Neighborhood Revitalization program, a 20-year, $400 million effort to strengthen Minneapolis neighborhoods.

Prior to joining Kresge, Rapson was president of the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation and also launched the Itasca Project, a private sector-led effort to develop a new regional agenda fort he Twin Cities.

He is the author of two books: Troubled Waters, a chronicle of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act legislation, and Ralph Rap-son: Sixty Years of Modern Design, a biography of his father, a renowned architect.Inspirational Young Alumni Award Lt.

Inspirational Young Alumni Award

Francine Segovia’04, a U.S. Navy Reserve research psychologist at the Robert E.Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, assists survivors recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She is part of a team of scientists and medical specialists examining how optimism and resilience may boost the health of extreme trauma victims.

Segovia, who will return to active-duty service at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, attributes her research skills to experience she gained while at Pomona, including participation in the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). “The critical thinking skills graduates from an institution like Pomona possess have a direct impact on all your work moving forward,” she says. “These skills have helped me tremendously as I navigated my career.”

Jerry Maguire Moments

September 4, 2014 by Jeremy Kniffin Comments Off

The walls of the Athletes First offices are filled with autographed jerseys, photos and other memorabilia from their National Football League clients, including such household names as Aaron Rodgers, Ray Lewis, Drew Bledsoe and Clay Matthews. Among the jerseys and photos in Andrew Kessler’s office is a framed copy of Newsday from 2011 showing a photo of New York Jets quarterback and Athletes First client Mark Sanchez celebrating a 28–21 playoff win over the New England Patriots with an exuberant scream and a handshake over the front railing of the stands.

Kessler ’03, who is a certified contract advisor and player agent with Athletes First in Laguna Hills, and who helped negotiate the (yes) 47-page rookie contract for Sanchez, is on the receiving end of the handshake. “My Jerry Maguire moment,” he laughs. “That was an AP photo, so it ended up everywhere.”

After graduating from Pomona with a degree in English, and playing for four years on the Sagehens football team, Kessler jumped right into his current field working at IMG Sports with Tom Condon, ranked by Sports Illustrated as the most influential sports agent in the country last year. Kessler, whose father has been a long-time legal representative for the NFL Players Association, had already served an internship with NBA agent Marc Fleisher while attending Pomona, traveling with 18-year old client Tony Parker to various NBA workouts (Parker has since gone on to win four NBA titles with the San Antonio Spurs and former Sagehen coach Gregg Popovich).

In his first two years at IMG, Kessler assisted Condon in putting together landmark contracts for Peyton Manning (seven years, $90 million) and Eli Manning (six years, $54 million), while also attending law school at the University of Texas. In his decade in the field at IMG and Athletes First, where he has worked primarily with David Dunn (No. 11 on the Sports Illustrated list of most influential agents), Kessler has been a part of negotiating contracts that total well over a billion dollars.

Most recently, Kessler helped put together a four-year, $40 million dollar deal for Super Bowl champion safety Earl Thomas of the Seattle Seahawks, making him the highest-paid player ever at his position. Kessler returned to his original home in New York City in February to see Thomas win Super Bowl XLIII at the Meadowlands, before helping to negotiate his landmark deal. Of course, Athletes First was guaranteed to be on the winning side of that Super Bowl regardless, as the firm also represents several members of the Denver Broncos, including wide receiver Wes Welker and linebacker Von Miller.

Kessler, who resides in Laguna Beach with his wife, Alison, and son, Jordan (2), has found success in a highly-competitive, big-money industry at an age when he has been younger than some of his clients. He draws some personal parallels to his playing days for Pomona-Pitzer football, when his teams went a combined 17–15 over four years despite fielding small rosters that were often significantly outweighed by their opponents.

“One lesson I learned from playing at Pomona is that you can’t judge a book by its cover,” he said. “Just about every game we played, we would lose the eyesight test. Sometimes if you just looked at the two teams in warm-ups, you’d think we’d lose by three or four touchdowns, but then the game would start and we’d win by playing harder, smarter or more fundamental football. You see the same things on the job, whether it be negotiating a contract or signing a player or issues with a client. The odds might look against you from the outside looking in, but you can accomplish your goals by digging deeper than the other guys and not being intimidated.”

He is also quick to point out that his academic experience at Pomona has been a big influence on his career. “Most of what I have learned in this business has come from on-the-job training or from my dad,” he said. “But the critical thinking and analytical skills that I use in my profession have come just as much from what I learned at Pomona, as an English major studying Henry James novels, as they have from taking law school courses in contract law.”

Although Kessler willingly made a reference to Jerry Maguire, the fictional sports agent played by Tom Cruise in the 1996 movie (best remembered for the phrase, “show me the money”), he does laugh at the way the movie portrays his line of work. “I imagine it’s the same way that real spies view James Bond movies,” he says. “People may see the eight-figure deals in the headlines, but there’s a real grind and blue-collar element to the job, which I enjoy. It takes months of negotiations and legwork to reach those deals. You can’t just walk in and say ‘give me this, I want it.’ You have to justify your rationale to the team.”

The life of a sports agent can also involve much more than negotiating the fine print of a 47-page contract, and Kessler feels that makes it even more rewarding. “One of my favorite things about this business is that you get to be involved in a lot of different charitable endeavors and other outside interests for your clients,” he says. “I’ve helped our clients raise money for sick kids, families of veterans, youth football organizations and all sorts of things. Some clients just want you involved in one specific part of their lives, and with other clients, you find yourself wearing a lot of different hats—relationship counselor, wedding planner, financial advisor, and you get to talk to them all the time.”

Kessler may also have a career-building opportunity as the primary agent representing Marqise Lee, a second-round pick of the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 2014 NFL Draft. Lee has a Hollywood-type story of overcoming a rough childhood that saw him bounce around several foster homes before becoming the Fred Biletnikoff Award winner at USC as the nation’s top wide receiver.

While his professional experience has been largely centered on the NFL, Kessler has also used his success at Athletes First to begin his own side project called K3 Tennis, which is representing Ernesto Escobedo, a 17-year-old rising star from West Covina. “I’m excited about it,” said Kessler. “It’s still in its early stages and if nothing else, it’s really fun. Some might call it a risky move to invest in something on my own, but that’s always been my personality. I traveled 3,000 miles from New York City to attend Pomona, which was a little bit risky, and I really liked my time at Pomona. When a risk like that pays off, you’re more willing to take other risks.”

His career as an athlete and as an agent has also given Kessler some philosophical perspective. Athletics is, by its nature, hyper-competitive, with a player’s or team’s value often defined by just a simple list of wins and losses. That attitude spills over into other sports-related industries as well. An agent’s success can be defined by wins and losses in contract negotiations, clients signed and dollars generated. Failures happen, and he sometimes sees colleagues who take each defeat as hard as the players on the field do.

“You have to appreciate successes,” he said. “You hear people say that they hate losing more than they like winning, and I understand that philosophy, but you have to have balance or you won’t be happy. My bad days aren’t really all that bad. On my good days, I’ve been there to see Earl Thomas win a Super Bowl. I’ve been there with Marqise Lee and his family when he was drafted, after he overcame so much adversity.”

Of course, he was also there to celebrate a big playoff win with Mark Sanchez and end up with his picture in newspapers all over the country.

“If you can’t enjoy a moment like that,” he says. “Something’s wrong.”

History & Change

September 4, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Hong Deng Gao ’15

MAJOR: History
SUPPORTED BY: Financial Aid, Draper Center for Community Partnerships, Summer Undergraduate Research Program, The Annual Fund

A native of China, Hong and her mother moved to Brooklyn in 2005. When her mother developed life-threatening liver disease, Hong helped her navigate the often confusing public hospital system. Determined to improve access to health care for other low-income immigrants, Hong developed a proposal through the Draper Center to train college volunteers as health navigators for patients with limited English proficiency and literacy. Hong devotes much of her free time to the Draper Center, working as a coordinator for programs such as Alternabreak, a community engagement spring break program.

History as explanation

“Because of my immigrant background, I like to trace things back to their origins, whether it’s the earliest pilgrims, or Chinese immigrants who came in the 1800s, or recent refugee groups. It can really help explain some of what we see now. Why do Chinatowns exist in the U.S. today? What were the Chinese discriminatory laws that were passed back then and how do they still impact people today?”

In the library and on the ground

“I’ve been working with Professor (Samuel) Yamashita on the impact Chinese restaurants have had on Chinese-American communities. In the summer after my sophomore year, I went to New York, where I interviewed and observed children who help out in their parents’ Chinese takeout restaurants and Korean grocery stores. I went back to New York this summer, and to Honolulu and San Francisco, where I conducted archival research in local libraries and museums on high-end Chinese restaurants. I wanted to know what these upscale restaurants mean in the context of Chinese immigration and race relations, and the history of restaurants in the three cities. So, in a sense, my research has been both sociological and historical.”

A mother’s struggle, a daughter’s inspiration

“My mom was the inspiration for my social entrepreneurship project with the Draper Center. She had liver disease, and from the time I was about 15 years old, I helped her deal with the public hospital system, because it was hard for her to do it on her own. She didn’t really speak any English and couldn’t read the signs or the documents or bills. When I got to Pomona, I started thinking more about this issue and how I could help other non-English speaking immigrants.”

Building a bridge to better health care

“The idea I came up with is Health Bridges, where bilingual college volunteers work with local hospitals to give parents like my mom the emotional support they need and help them understand and navigate the system.

The students are definitely going to be a lot more competent in understanding the hospital procedures than these immigrant patients who are already sick and tired and can’t really deal with the system anymore.” [Health Bridges is dedicated to Hong’s mother, Jian Li Lin, who died in 2011.]

Coaching from the Draper Center

“Emily Arnold-Hernandez ’99, who teaches a social entrepreneurship workshop at the Draper Center, helped us develop our visions, goals and budgets, and to understand every single detail of how nonprofit organizations work. Where do you get funding? What are all the questions that you need to think about and have prepared before you can pitch the proposal to a funder? It was really great. I’m planning to start a pilot project this semester and, if it works out, to take a gap year before grad school to fully develop the program in different hospitals and expand it to other college campuses.”

Academia and social change

“I’ve been thinking about the question of how to bridge academia with social justice and social change. Some people see them as very distinct fields, but I think as a scholar you can still make a huge impact in society. You can change the mindset of your audience. And if the audience is policy makers or other scholars or even college students, and if they go on and take this message with them, then that’s the impact that I’d like to have.”

Daring Minds

“When I think of Daring Minds, I think of three characteristics. One is to have a vision; second is to be willing to take the risk of implementing that vision; and third is accomplishing your goal by taking concrete steps, not being afraid of failure and persevering until the end.”

Mother and Warrior

September 4, 2014 by Mary E. Marvin Comments Off

thomas-400 In today’s session of Professor Valorie Thomas’s class on AfroFuturisms, the discussion focuses on a painting by Christy Freeman and how the image both represents and challenges our conceptions of motherhood and reflects the blending of African Diaspora spirituality with Christianity.

Thomas: The belief is that when you are born, everyone has a protector, an Orisha who watches over your head, your “Ori,” like a guardian spirit or a guardian angel. You might have relationships with one or more Orishas, and it is within your power as a human being to cultivate those relationships and to learn the lessons that Orisha has to teach you.

There are many Orisha and Catholic saint correspondences as a result of Africanisms encoded within Christianity. If you see images of Mary, and she’s surrounded by stars and is in this archway full of color, and she’s standing on a rock on the sea, all that ideography is consistent with Yemaya, the ocean goddess who is seen as the ultimate protector and great mother figure. So she may be respected as Mary, but the figure will also be recognized and loved as Yemaya.

Each Orisha can have dozens of paths. There’s Erzulie, a Haitian Orisha or Loa, who corresponds to the Yoruba Oshun and is also related to Yemaya. Erzulie is also connected to nurturing and motherliness, but she is the personification of love and the erotic, so she is seductive, flirtatious, loves jewelry, mirrors and sweets and wants to see people happy. But beneath that sweet façade, there’s a formidable persona. I’m going to show you a painting of Erzulie Dantor, a different side or path of this deity. I’d like to have you respond to the image first, and then I’ll tell you what fascinates me about it.

Chloe: In the heart on the crown, the top reminds me of ram’s horns, giving the sense that this is someone who is tender and warm but also can defend herself.

Thomas: Yes, this is reworking stories about the feminine, about gender, about power, breaking some of those conventional story lines that associate romance with sentimentality and weakness and docility. There’s tension that comes through that might, in other contexts, seem diametrically opposed, but in this figure they are combined. The softness and hardness; the love, the heart, but also the dagger.

Sophie: It feels like a lot more emphasis on the mother figure, but then also there’s a protective quality that I don’t think is in Western portraits. Mary isn’t usually actively protecting the baby and wielding a knife or wielding any sort of weaponry.

Thomas: What do we know as viewers about those images that you’re talking about? Where Mary’s not necessarily on watch, on guard; the child is just in his mother’s arms. How does the story end? Those images of Madonna and child, that’s the beginning of the story. We already know the ending. This is a disturbing image in that this Mary is thinking off script. It’s a stance of agency and aggression, a huge intervention on the narrative and on the established, fundamental, archetypal, Christian narrative, even though it’s still framed as Christianity.

Byron: I have a question about her necklace. I wanted to know: what’s the significance of that as a Christian icon?

Thomas: It’s a heart and what else? What is hanging below the heart?

Chloe: It could be a skull.

Byron: It looks like a nail.

Thomas: It’s silver. Is it a nail, are we agreeing that it’s a nail?

Byron: There is also something that looks like a snake.

Thomas: I’m so glad you brought up the necklace. We need to consider all those possibilities. The snake is an ancient Vodun archetype, not evil but representative of life and transformation. What about the line of that little dagger on the necklace? Where’s the line going?

Renata: It’s going right towards him.

Thomas: It’s going right towards him, right? In this case, Mary’s saying, “Well, I have a knife, too.”

Sophie: The stars in the painting also are evocative for me. It’s like faith of some sort, which maybe is nonsensical or unreasonable, because they also have resonance with anti-faith.

Thomas: In a particularly African-American or African diasporic context, how might you come to be thinking about the stars?

Sophie: A star guide for going home.

Catherine: Using the signs of the stars to move north.

Thomas: To move north because?

Catherine: Out of slavery. To freedom.

Thomas: The stars are the liberation narrative, at least back in the day of enslavement when knowing about astronomy was a useful skill in escaping and moving towards liberation. When I first saw this amazing picture it immediately tweaked my understanding of the character Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She commits infanticide when the slave catchers are on her heels. The controversy, the tension in this story is the question: Is this motherhood? I think the painting also asks that same question. What if the knife ends up being something that is protecting the child by keeping it from the attacker who will certainly dehumanize and obliterate its spirit? Sethe says, “I wasn’t going to let them take that child, wasn’t going to let them make that child go through the monstrosity that I went through.” It redefines the terms of motherhood as not only creator but also potential destroyer; nurturer but also warrior. That’s the ultimate extreme case, extreme scenario, but it does bring the idea of the feminine principle into connection with the highest possible stakes of life and death.

Art in his DNA

September 4, 2014 by Feather Rose Flores ’17 Comments Off

Before he was cataloguing the nearly 10,000 pieces in the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) collection, museum Associate Director and Registrar Steve Comba was earning a reputation among his fifth-grade classmates for copying Peanuts cartoons and drawing “Wanted” posters of his least favorite teachers—a feat which often got him into trouble. Comba still has a sharp, sly sense of humor, but when it comes to managing the College’s art collection, he’s all business.

Comba never set out to work for a museum. As an undergraduate, he attended the UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies, later relocating to Claremont, where he received his MFA in Studio Art from the Claremont Graduate University in 1986. All he wanted was a teaching job that would enable him to pay the rent for his own studio. Until he could find a position, he took a part-time job photographing, mapping and framing prints at the Galleries of The Claremont Colleges, the former museum jointly run by Pomona and Scripps colleges. When two positions at the gallery opened up, Comba inquired about being gallery manager. “I thought it would be more appropriate for a studio artist to be the person who hangs the work, but the curator of collections thought I should look at the position of registrar instead,” he recalls. “My response was, ‘Okay…what is that?’”

As it turns out, it’s a lot. Comba’s official job description is to track everything about every object in the museum, whether it belongs to the PCMA collection or is on loan from another institution. If someone needs to know where an object is and how it’s doing, Comba is the person to call. He also oversees conservation efforts of pieces that have seen better days. “I get a lot of personal gratification when I’ve done something for an object that I know will further its preservation,” he says.

But for Comba, being the museum’s registrar is more than just cataloguing. When his daughter was a student at Sycamore Elementary, he enjoyed being able to supplement her class’s lessons about native peoples by bringing in real Cherokee sandals. Now he is one of the main coordinators of the museum’s two-year-old outreach program to local third grade classes. In the College-sponsored program, students take a field trip to the museum to see in person the artifacts they studied in the classroom. Comba advocates a hands-on approach, sometimes even letting students wear gloves and pass around a 130-year-old Cherokee lacrosse ball. He works hard to structure his lessons so that students have an opportunity to see the continuity of culture.

Comba is also an active figure in the museum’s internship program. He has been in the museum business so long—July marked his 28th year with PCMA—that several influential figures behind the doors of larger institutions, such as the registrar of Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum, were his students. However, the most rewarding part of the job for Comba is still his intimate connection to the art. “At a certain point, you can say it’s no longer a choice,” he explains. “The need becomes ingrained in the DNA. Whenever we travel on vacation and we’re anywhere within reasonable distance of a museum, my family knows that I’m going to start to sweat if I don’t get to go in there and see it. I was asked how I get ideas for my paintings and it’s the same thing. I no longer have to look for them, because every time I look out I see the world through a painting.”

As for the future of PCMA, Comba says that talk of a new, larger museum is in the works. With a collection that grows by 100 to 170 objects a year, adding more space only makes sense. “A museum isn’t just about the contents,” he explains. “It’s a place. The place either enhances or detracts from the experience of the visitor. What’s exciting about the future is that our desire to expand is not just about making the museum bigger. It’s about having that relationship be fundamentally better. It’s an exciting thing to be a part of.”

And yet, playing such a vital role in running a college museum was never what Comba initially imagined he would end up doing. “I lucked into it. It wasn’t a plan, but this gig with the museum is working out,” he says, laughing. “If you asked, I’d say I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”

Hitting Winners

September 4, 2014 by Jeremy Kniffin Comments Off

Many collegiate student-athletes arrive on campus with lofty aspirations. They might hope to represent their country in international competition one day. Maybe they dream of becoming published authors, or coming up with their own ideas for non-profit organizations and building them from scratch.

Mae Coyiuto ’16, the top-ranked singles player on Pomona-Pitzer’s women’s tennis team, had already accomplished all of that before her first day at Pomona.

The inspiration to become a writer caught hold very early in her life.

“When I was about five years old, my mom got this new laptop computer,” said Coyiuto. “To me, it looked like the shiniest, best toy ever, but my mom told me I wasn’t allowed to play with it. In the morning, though, I would sneak in the living room and play around with the computer. I discovered this magical thing called Microsoft Powerpoint and I wrote my first story on a slideshow presentation. One day my mom caught me on the computer and instead of scolding me for disobeying her, she read my story. From that day on, I never really stopped writing.”

By the time she was 10, Coyiuto was a published author, writing three children’s books in her native Philippines. As she grew older, she was inspired to write a book of short stories at age 16, titled Flight to the Stars.

Even in those early years, Coyiuto knew she had found a life-long passion. Being behind a keyboard allowed her to open up in ways that were perhaps more difficult in real life.

“I’ve always been a person who never really said much, but writing has always been a venue where I can express myself. I can write the most bizarre things, and some might even call it creativity. One thing I love about writing is that no matter how old you are or where you’re from, there is someone out there who will pay attention to what you have to say.”

Coyiuto wasn’t content with merely finding her own inspiration and seeing it through. She wanted others to have the same opportunity, so she started an organization to help build libraries in Habitat for Humanity communities in the Philippines. “The idea of our “Gintong Isip” (Golden Minds) library stemmed from both my experiences with writing and tennis. My biggest role models were some of the kids I met in junior tennis. They all had big dreams of playing for the Davis Cup, ranking internationally or getting college scholarships. I’m very happy to say that some of these kids toured abroad and got full-ride scholarships to the top universities in the Philippines. I think that everyone should be given the chance to dream and strive for something the way these players have.

“I have been terribly blessed to find things that I love so much, and I wanted to help others find their passions, too. I think the best way to do this is through literacy. Exposing people to all kinds of stories can inspire them to dream. My main reason for coming up with the Golden Minds project was to help others (especially children) realize that they have this incredible potential to be whoever they want to be. Through the amazing help of Habitat for Humanity, we were able to put up our first library last summer. During the opening, there were kids there who told me that they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, and one even said she wanted to be the next president. The goal of Gintong Isip is to make these dreams a reality.”

Coyiuto was also an overachiever on the tennis courts at a young age, winning several junior tournaments and representing the Philippines in the Junior Fed Cup in Malaysia in 2010. She still came to Pomona uncertain of how she would fare at the collegiate tennis level, but her very first tournament during her freshman fall alleviated any fears, as she advanced to the semifinals of the ITA West Regionals before falling to the No. 1 seed (Kristin Lim of CMS).

“That tournament will always be one of my best memories in tennis,” she said. “Before coming here, I was really nervous about playing college tennis. But while I was playing in the fall tournament, I knew that I was going to love playing for Pomona-Pitzer. Even though we had been playing for three days and it was over 100 degrees out, every single member of the team was out there cheering for each other. It didn’t matter that it was only my first year on the team or if my opponent was one point away from winning, they were all there for me. I’ve never felt this kind of support until I came here. The support my teammates gave me during that fall tournament helped me start to believe more in myself.”

She felt the same support off the court as well, when tragedy struck last fall. She was thousands of miles away when Typhoon Haiyan (Typhoon Yolanda, as it is known in the Philippines) devastated her home country, and although her family and local community were spared the brunt of the storm, she knew plenty of people directly affected.

“The hardest part about being away during Typhoon Yolanda was hearing about the casualties, seeing the destruction and feeling that I couldn’t do anything to help. Thankfully, my amazing AAMP mentor, Kim Africa [’15], planned a fundraising dinner for the victims. This event made me realize how lucky I was to be part of the 5C community and the tennis team. I was so touched when my professors, even from my freshman year, sent me an e-mail checking up on me and asked if there was any way they could help with the fundraiser.

“Even with all their work and other responsibilities, my teammates spent hours helping me make Filipino desserts for the event. I also reached out to the CMS women’s tennis team, asking if they could donate a basket for the raffle and they made the most beautiful basket I’ve ever seen. Seeing all my friends and teammates at the dinner made me realize that I’ve found my second home in this community.”

Coyiuto played most of her freshman season at No. 2 singles, and led the team with a 17–6 record. As a sophomore this spring, she led the team in wins again (17–8) and moved up to the No. 1 position in singles, helping Pomona-Pitzer to a No. 6 national ranking and an appearance at the NCAA Regional finals. But ask her about specific goals she may have over the rest of her tennis career, and she turns attention away from herself after one sentence.

“I hope to grow more as a player and to never stop trying to get better,” she said. “More than that, I hope that each member of the team meets her goals and loves the sport more and more during her time in Pomona-Pitzer tennis. I want to help continue the tradition of the PP tennis team as an area of support, love and family for each member.”

Providing support and love to the greater community is one area where Coyiuto has always managed to hit a winner.

The Code of Beauty, the Beauty of Code

September 4, 2014 by Vikram Chandra ’84 Comments Off

Class Program
{
public static void Main()
{
System.Console.WriteLine( “Hello, world!” );
}
}

Even if you’re the kind of person who tells new acquaintances at dinner parties that you hate email and e-books, you probably recognize the words above as being some kind of computer code. You may even be able to work out, more or less, what this little ‘program’ does: it writes to the console of some system the line ‘Hello, world!’

hackers-300 A geek hunched over a laptop tapping frantically at the keyboard, neon-bright lines of green code sliding up the screen—the programmer at work is now a familiar staple of popular entertainment. The clipped shorthand and digits of programming languages are familiar even to civilians, if only as runic incantations charged with world-changing power. Computing has transformed all our lives, but the processes and cultures that produce software remain largely opaque, alien, unknown. This is certainly true within my own professional community of fiction writers—whenever I tell one of my fellow authors that I supported myself through the writing of my first novel by working as a programmer and a computer consultant, I evoke a response that mixes bemusement, bafflement and a touch of awe, as if I’d just said that I could levitate. Most of the artists I know—painters, film-makers, actors, poets —seem to regard programming as an esoteric scientific discipline; they are keenly aware of its cultural mystique, envious of its potential profitability, and eager to extract metaphors, imagery and dramatic possibility from its history, but coding may as well be nuclear physics as far as relevance to their own daily practice is concerned.

Many programmers, on the other hand, regard themselves as artists. Since programmers create complex objects and care not just about function but also about beauty, they are just like painters and sculptors. The best-known assertion of this notion is the essay ‘Hackers and Painters’ by programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham. ‘What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.’

According to Graham, the iterative processes of programming—write, debug (discover and remove bugs, which are coding errors, mistakes), rewrite, experiment, debug, rewrite—exactly duplicate the methods of artists: ‘The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way … You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.’ Attention to detail further marks good hackers with artist-like passion:

All those unseen details [in a Leonardo da Vinci painting] combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune. Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.

This desire to equate art and programming has a lengthy pedigree. In 1972, the famed computer scientist Butler Lampson published an editorial titled ‘Programmers as Authors’ which began:

Creative endeavor varies greatly in the amount of overhead (i.e. money, manpower and organization) associated with a project which calls for a given amount of creative work. At one extreme is the activity of an aircraft designer, at the other that of a poet. The art of programming currently falls much closer to the former than the latter. I believe, however, that this situation is likely to change considerably in the next decade.

Lampson’s argument was that hardware would become so cheap that ‘almost everyone who uses a pencil will use a computer,’ and that these users would be able to use ‘reliable software components’ to put together complex programs. ‘As a result, millions of people will write non-trivial programs, and hundreds of thousands will try to sell them.’

hackers-250 A poet, however, might wonder why Lampson would place poetry making on the same spectrum of complexity as aircraft design, how the two disciplines—besides being ‘creative’—are in any way similar. After all, if Lampson’s intent is to point towards the future reduction of technological overhead and the democratization of programming, there are plenty of other technical and scientific fields in which the employment of pencil and paper by individuals might produce substantial results. Architecture, perhaps, or carpentry, or mathematics. One thinks of Einstein in the patent office at Bern. But even the title of Lampson’s essay hints at a desire for kinship with writers, an identification that aligns what programmers and authors do and makes them—somehow, eventually—the same.

Both writers and programmers struggle with language. The code at the beginning of this chapter is in Microsoft’s C#, one of thousands of high-level programming languages invented over the last century.

Each of these is a ‘formal language,’ a language ‘with explicit and precise rules for its syntax and semantics,’ as the Oxford Dictionary of Computing puts it. Formal languages ‘contrast with natural languages such as English whose rules, evolving as they do with use, fall short of being either a complete or a precise definition of the syntax, much less the semantics, of the language.’ So these formal dialects may be less flexible and less forgiving of ambiguity than natural languages, but coders—like poets—manipulate linguistic structures and tropes, search for expressivity and clarity. While a piece of code may pass instructions to a computer, its real audience, its readers, are the programmers who will add features and remove bugs in the days and years after the code is first created. Donald Knuth is the author of the revered magnum opus on computer algorithms and data structure, The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 3 of the Art was published in 1973; the first part of Volume 4 appeared in 2011; the next part is ‘under preparation.’ If ever there was a person who fluently spoke the native idiom of machines, it is Knuth, computing’s greatest living sage. More than anyone else, he understands the paradox that programmers write code for other humans, not for machines: ‘Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.’ In 1984, therefore, he famously formalized the notion of ‘literate programming’:

The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.

Good code, then, is marked by qualities that go beyond the purely practical; like equations in physics and mathematics, code can aspire to elegance. Knuth remarked about the code of a compiler that it was ‘plodding and excruciating to read, because it just didn’t possess any wit whatsoever. It got the job done, but its use of the computer was very disappointing.’

To get the job done—a novice may imagine that this is what code is supposed to do. Code is, after all, a series of commands issued to a dumb hunk of metal and silicon and plastic animated by electricity. What more could you want it to do, to be? Knuth answers: code must be ‘absolutely beautiful.’ He once said about a program called SOAP (Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program) that ‘reading it was like hearing a symphony, because every instruction was sort of doing two things and everything came together gracefully.’

We are now unmistakably in the realm of human perception, taste and pleasure, and therefore of aesthetics. Can code itself—as opposed to the programs that are constructed with code—be beautiful? Programmers certainly think so. Greg Wilson, the editor of Beautiful Code, an anthology of essays by programmers about ‘the most beautiful piece of code they knew,’ writes in his forward to that book:

I got my first job as a programmer in the summer of 1982. Two weeks after I started, one of the system administrators loaned me Kernighan and Plauger’s The Elements of Programming Style … and Wirth’s Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. … [These books] were a revelation—for the first time, I saw that programs could be more than just instructions for computers. They could be as elegant as well-made kitchen cabinets, as graceful as a suspension bridge, or as eloquent as one of George Orwell’s essays.

Knuth himself is careful to limit the scope of his aesthetic claims: ‘I do think issues of style do come through and make certain programs a genuine pleasure to read. Probably not, however, to the extent that they would give me any transcendental emotions.’ But in the many discussions that programmers have about craftsmanship, elegance and beauty, there is an unmistakable tendency to assert—as Wilson does—that code is as ‘eloquent’ as literature. …

The day that millions will dash off beautiful programs—as easily as with a pencil—still remains distant. The ‘lovely gems and brilliant coups’ of coding remain hidden and largely incomprehensible to outsiders. But the beauty that programmers pursue leads to their own happiness, and—not incidentally—to the robustness of the systems they create, so the aesthetics of code impact your life more than you know.

This excerpt from Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press), by Vikram Chandra ’84, is published with permission of the author. In his first venture into nonfiction, the noted novelist roams from logic gates to the writings of 11th-century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta, in search of connections between the worlds of art and technology.

Photos accompanying this excerpt are from the Spring 2014 Hackathon held at Pomona College and are by John Lucas.

Code Blue

September 4, 2014 by Adam Rogers ’92 Comments Off

Lunch was supposed to be casual. Mikey Dickerson ’01 was in Chicago catching up with Dan Wagner, a friend who’d been in the trenches with him on Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency in 2012. Wagner had since gone on to found a company, Civis Analytics; Dickerson was a site reliability engineer at Google, one of the people who make sure that the search engine never, ever breaks down.

This was October of 2013, no time for the President’s geekiest loyalists to have a little fun. Healthcare.gov, the sign-up website that was the signature element of President Obama’s signature initiative, was a technological disaster. People couldn’t sign up even if they wanted to—the site would break, or fail. Delays were interminable. Information got lost. Customer service was about as good as you’d expect from a cable TV company. The Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the new health care system, couldn’t seem to get it working.

“So, we got this phone call yesterday,” Wagner told Dickerson. “HHS is looking for help with healthcare.gov. Can I list you as an advisor or consultant?”

“Yeah, sure. If it’s any value to you, list me,” Dickerson replied. It seemed innocuous enough. Today, he smiles at his own naïveté. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. About a week later, Dickerson found himself on a 5 a.m. conference call with a van full of technologists in Washington D.C., headed over to HHS. With him in the White House motor-pool car was Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer. And Park, whom Dickerson didn’t know, was selling the group as a team of experts who could solve any tech problem. Dickerson realized: They’re saying I can fix healthcare.gov.

Without really meaning to, Dickerson had become an anchor of the Obama administration’s “tech surge,” a Silicon Valley-powered push to fix the bugs in the healthcare.gov system. But the system was more than just software. In D.C., Dickerson and his new team found an organization in bureaucratic and technological meltdown, unable to execute what any e-commerce start-up would consider basic prerequisites for being in business.

The crazy part is, they fixed it.

To a Connecticut native like Dickerson, good at math and computers but with no desire to attend a big university, Pomona shows itself off pretty well—especially on a campus visit in May, when Dartmouth might still have slush on the ground. It’s not that he was so avid about computer science—in those days, as a major, CS really ran out of Harvey Mudd anyway—it’s just that Dickerson was an ace. He felt like he was cheating just a little. “It seemed dumb to be spending all that money on something I was already good at,” he says. In fact, Dickerson was already coding for various companies while in school. After graduation, he ended up working in Pomona’s computer lab.

Then the 2000 presidential election came around, with its photo finish in favor of George W. Bush. “It was a trauma for me,” Dickerson says. “That razor’s edge. All that was intensely painful. Almost anything would have moved those last 200 votes.” So in 2004 Dickerson volunteered with a poll-watching group … and caught the politics bug. Four years later he was working at Google, where CEO Eric Schmidt was (and remains) a multimillion-dollar Obama supporter. During campaign season an email went to a mass-distribution list that Dickerson was on, looking for people who could manage big databases for the Obama campaign.

Hey, Dickerson thought. I manage a group that runs large databases. And that was it. He worked as a volunteer in Chicago, one of a small group of techies who, during their long nights, idly wondered if maybe they could do something useful for the campaign with better records of people’s voting history. When the 2012 campaign came around, he was still on the campaign organizers’ list. This time, though, he was no newbie—though still technically a volunteer, his experience made him a trusted veteran. Those vague ideas about leveraging voter lists went into practice, and Dickerson’s group became the analytics team, credited by some political analysts as having been the key to Obama’s re-election. Once the campaign was over, Dickerson went back to managing a site reliability engineering team at Google, but he stayed in touch with his friends—which is why Dickerson was at lunch with Wagner on October 11.

The tech team’s first stop, in Virginia on October 17, was PowerPoint Hell. Technically, it was a large IT firm working as a government contractor. “They scheduled a three-hour meeting and sent a VP with, I shit you not, a 130-slide PowerPoint presentation,” Dickerson says. Over beers in a bar on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, about a block from Google’s offices, Dickerson wears the uniform of the coder—hoodie, Google ID badge, Google T-shirt, close-cropped hair and unshaven chin. In San Francisco, that’s stealth armor. In Washington’s blue-sports-coated, khaki-pantsed hallways, he was an alien.

The group fought its way out of the meeting and took over the office of someone who was on vacation. Then they went wandering, finding teams huddled in cubicles and asking them what they were working on, which bugs they were trying to fix. But they weren’t—mostly they were waiting for instructions. In their defense, it was hard to figure out what needed fixing. Engineers weren’t really allowed to talk to clients or users, and the people who created the healthcare.gov website hadn’t even built a dashboard, a way to monitor the health and status of their own system. If you wanted to know whether healthcare.gov was functioning, the only way to find out was to try to log on. “We thought this would be a targeted assessment and we’d spend a few days there,” says Paul Smith, another member of the team. “When we realized how bad things were, we just independently decided, we’re not going home. This is what we’re doing now, for an indefinite period of time, until it gets better.”

After a couple of days, Park asked them whether it could be fixed. “Todd, they have made all the mistakes that can be made,” Dickerson told him. “We can barely find a case where, when two decisions could be made, they made the right one. But low-hanging fruit isn’t the right metaphor. We’re stepping on the fruit.” The point was, some very simple fixes would yield some very big gains. Any improvement would be a massive improvement. Google site reliability engineers have a saying—they tell each other, if we have an outage that big it’ll be on the front page of The New York Times. Is that what you want? “But here’s the thing,” says Dickerson. “Healthcare.gov had been on the front page of The New York Times for four weeks. That was the silver lining. How much more could I screw it up?”

The group of coders decided that if no one was telling anyone what to do, they would. That’s when they started getting called “the Ad Hoc Team.” The name stuck. “We had a big stick, because we were the magical guys from the White House,” Dickerson says. “After a couple of days, we instituted a war room.” Every morning at 10 a.m., every team had to send a representative to a big meeting to explain what was going right, or wrong, and why. “It was an incredibly expensive thing to do—60 people in a room while we arbitrate disputes between two of them. But we made so much progress we stopped worrying,” Dickerson says. “Having a giant studio audience is better sometimes. It’s harder to say, ‘I didn’t do that because it wasn’t on my task order.’”

In other words, Dickerson had built into the system something no one had thought of: accountability. “What Mikey really excelled at was, if there’s a priority issue that needs to be addressed, how can people address it? What do they know? What do they need to know? What’s blocking them?” says Smith. “That’s just his demeanor and the way he operates.” The meetings were so productive and making so much of a difference in site performance that the Ad Hoc Team instituted a second one, making them twice a day, seven days a week.

When they weren’t in the war room, they coded. Problems started getting solved. A stupid little flaw that required the same kind of wait to connect to the database every time went away with the change of a couple of configuration settings, and poof! An eight-second response delay dropped to a two-second delay. “And that’s still terrible,” Dickerson says. The site stopped crashing. People actually started signing up for health care.

The work took a toll, though. Except for a quick trip back to California to pick up some clothes—Dickerson had come to the East Coast with a carry-on bag and a Google computer, expecting a short visit—he was in the greater D.C. area from mid-October through Christmas. Dickerson estimated he ran 150 war-room meetings in a row.

After a couple of moves to accommodate bureaucracy, Dickerson ended up working remotely, alone, from an operations center in Columbia, Md.—three hours from D.C. in what locals sometimes call “spook valley” for its preponderance of government contractors. Since healthcare.gov’s original creators hadn’t built a ship-in-a-bottle version of the software to test updates and fixes, everything the Ad Hoc Team fixed had to get changed on the live site, and the primary maintenance window was when traffic was lightest, between 1 and 5 a.m. “It was literally 20-hour days a lot of time. ” Dickerson says. “I was hallucinating by the end, hearing things.”

With 12 days left before the deadline, Dickerson was ready to go home. He gave a speech listing the five mission-critical things remaining, and attempted to flee back to California. But the bosses panicked. The Ad Hoc guys can’t go home, they said. They gave him the service-to-your-country pitch. They begged. So Dickerson agreed to stay through to the end—with some conditions. He got to set the specific technical goals for what his team and the rest of the government coders would do. And he got to hire whomever he wanted, without arguing the point. He wanted to be able to trust the new team members, so he chose them himself. Eventually a rotating team of Google site reliability engineers started coming through to keep the project on track.

Dickerson got to dictate those terms because he was getting results. He had become indispensable. “Mikey is an incredible talent who was seemingly built in a lab to help fix healthcare.gov,” Park says. “It’s not just the fact that he’s got a sky-high tech IQ, honed over years as a star site reliability engineering leader. He’s also got tremendous EQ, enabling him to step into a tough situation, mesh well with others, and help rally them to the job at hand.”

The real bummer, of course, is that healthcare.gov, while an unprecedented attempt to link government services, private insurers and identity verification, shouldn’t have been that hard to build. “It’s basically a distributed, transactional, retail-type website, and we’ve been building those for years,” says Smith. “In the private sector, we know how to do that. We’re not forging new computer science ground here, right?”

By April of 2014, just a few days after Dickerson and I spoke, the Obama administration announced that over 7 million people had signed up for private health care through federal and state exchanges, and 3 million had signed up for Medicare. The program had made its numbers—barely, to be sure—because people, in the end, could actually use the website.

Dickerson is back at Google, but as he says, “you can never unsee the things you see in the federal government.” He has become an outspoken advocate for reform in the ways government builds technology, concentrating especially on trying to convince young technologists to go work for government. “You’re gonna eat free food and drink free soda in micro-kitchens and work on another version of what we’ll say, for argument’s sake, lets people share pictures of what they ate for breakfast, and tens of thousands of people will die of leukemia because we couldn’t get a website to work,” Dickerson says. “These are real people’s lives that will end in 2014, and you’re going to sit at your desk working on picture sharing.”

The problem isn’t competence. People who work on websites for the government are every bit as competent as the ones who work at Google or Facebook. “The mechanisms by which you do a contract with the federal government are so complex that it requires expertise in and of itself,” says Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, a group that connects software developers with local governments. “Fundamentally the process in government has evolved to meet government needs. A federal project has dozens of stakeholders, none of whom represent the user.”

That’s why Code for America focuses on local governments, Pahlka says. The feds are too hard to crack, and anyway, most people’s interactions with government are at the state and city level—think DMV, local parks, or trash pick-up. So Dickerson has started stumping for Code for America, giving speeches at their events. And he is lobbying Eric Schmidt and his other bosses at Google to develop programs that would allow—maybe even encourage—software developers there to take time to work on government projects. Consider: The feds paid $700 million for healthcare.gov, and it didn’t work. Imagine being able to bid for that contract at a tenth the price. “I don’t have to appeal to your altruism or desire to serve your country,” Dickerson says. “I can just say, ‘Do you want to make a ton of money?”

Pahlka thinks the pitch might actually work—and not just because of capitalism. “The consumer internet has influenced the way a generation feels about doing things together,” she says. “You have a generation of people who value collective intelligence and collective will—not necessarily collective political will, but the ability to actually do things together.” Software designers and engineers are already political, Pahlka and Dickerson are saying; it’s just that the web generation is ignoring the greater good. Going to work at Twitter is a political choice just as much as going to work for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I give the worst sales pitch,” Dickerson says. “I tell people, ‘This is what your world is going to be like: It’s a website that is a Lovecraft horror. They made every possible mistake at every possible layer. But if you succeed, you will save the lives of thousands of people.’”

The weird part: Almost everyone says yes.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Shortly before this magazine went to press, Dickerson announced that he’s going to practice what he preaches, full time. He is leaving Google to join the Obama administration as administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, a newly created office overseeing government spending on information technology. And after signing on, he discovered that the lead designer on the initial staff for U.S.D.S. is another Pomona grad, Mollie Ruskin ’08.

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