Last week, I mentored a hackathon for beginners and intermediates at The Cooper Union and found myself repeating the same two pieces of advice over and over again. Since programmers shouldn’t ever repeat themselves, I decided to write it down and share with the world. This advice applies if you've been having trouble getting motivated to take the next step or learn new things often.

I'm fascinated by Morse code. It teaches us about encoding, language, technology, and our ability to learn to communicate in a revolutionary manner.

There are lots of people talking about big data these days. There's a lot of discussion about how to build apps for "web scale", and there's an emphasis on real time apps that collect comprehensive data.

This article is me playing devil's advocate.

I just spent 48 hours without electricity. I'm not complaining; I could have had it much worse (many people in Staten Island did) and very fortunately nobody I know was hurt or lost their home. But my experience without power got me thinking.

About a year ago I built a Chrome extension called SiteChat -- the premise was simple: turn every website into a chatroom. The app was an instant success, and over the following year I watched entire societies emerge and die off inside the bizarre ecosystem that I had created.