Read this Q&A with new Digg.com CTO Michael Young

The NYC Media Lab‘s Justin Hendrix got a chance to interview Digg CTO, Michael Young, a Brooklynite.  The interview covers a lot of ground, from new technologies, how Digg builds, what they see down the road and the future of media.

We liked the part where Young talked about his interest in empowering non-developers on the staff with knowledge about code:

So the editorial team at Digg were my guinea pigs. I built six weeks of classes for them, and I taught them some of the basics of programming. Of course, there is a window of time where you need to decide if you like it or not. That was my experiment- that slog at the beginning, can I make that more fun. If you look at something like Codeacademy, which is a big undertaking, you’re learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, maybe Ruby or Python- learning these languages can be incredibly boring. So my thought was can we start with Processing. Data visualization experts like Jer Thorp and Mark Hansen use Processing to build some of their visualiations. My hypothesis is that doing something more visual, more interactive can help get beginners over the hump.

[Medium]