About

James Golick

James Golick is an engineer, entrepreneur, speaker, and above all else, a grinder.

As CTO (or something?) of BitLove, he scaled FetLife.com's traffic by more than an order of magnitude (and counting).

James spends most of his time writing ruby and scala, building infrastructure, and extinguishing fires.

He speaks regularly at conferences and blogs periodically, but James values shipping code over just about anything else.

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James on the Web

Bringing Computer Savvy & Web 2.0 to Pre-Teen Girls

Mar 30 2009

I'm a huge fan of screencasting. It's a great way to learn about software development. Screencasting is also starting to be used to teach general daily computing topics. Nevertheless, it remains something of a niche. The general public still doesn't really know about screencasting.

There certainly isn't a whole lot of screencast content aimed at kids, except maybe a programming tutorial or two. There's nothing (I can find) aimed at young girls.

Hailey Hacks aims to fill that void in the market. Hailey is a savvy pre-teen girl. She's fun — and a little bit rebellious. You might think of her as a cross between Bart and Lisa Simpson.

In the first episode, titled April Fools, Hailey teaches you how to play pranks, low tech and high. First, she suggests that you fill your father's shampoo bottle with ketchup. Later in the episode, she recommends using wakerupper.com to incessantly ring your father's phone while you're at school. I'll let Hailey show you the rest of them.


So far, we've got one other episode up there, in which Hailey teaches you to make your own lolcats. Lots more are coming. Hear first by following @HaileyHacks or subscribing to Hailey's blog.

Despite the fact that this is web 2.0, we're selling the videos for 2$ each over at the Hailey Hacks site. We'd love to hear what you and your kids think of them!