Understanding The Internet Through The Lens Of Minecraft

What can Minecraft tell us about the way data powers the internet?

It turns out, quite a bit.

In fact, we can model most businesses in Minecraft.

I realized this when I started with a joke about heading out to a long day of work in the data mines.

That led me to outline a course using Minecraft as the model.

The course will be released over a 6 week period, with the first lesson coming Nov. 7th. Anyone who signs up before the course is completed will receive emails each week with the course material. There will be 6 modules:

Module 1: Introduction - What makes Minecraft a great way to model this?

This will cover the basics of why I love Minecraft and an overview of how the concepts map.

Module 2: Data Mining

We're going to look at data as blocks, and figure out where we can find them and what we can do with them.

Module 3: Idea Crafting

How can we take the data we mined and combine it in different ways? I think there are a lot of potential cool things to explore here.

Might even start a recipe book to take ideas and combine them, we'll see!

Module 4: Base Design

In Minecraft, you usually need to create a base for yourself, so you can venture out to various locations to collect resources, and bring them back to build better equipment.

How can we do that with data?

Module 5: Farming

How can we set up some things to grab data automatically? What can we do to put in a little bit of work, wait a bit, and get more out in return?

In Minecraft, advanced players can set up all sorts of resource farms. How can we do that with data?

Module 6: Multiplayer

What happens when you want to bring others into the mix? In this module, we'll cover how to work together with other players and set up things we can use to make that easier.

In addition to the course, I'm going to offer a behind-the-scenes community that will be able to watch the course get developed and released, and I'll have community events and Q/A sessions. I'm a big believer in Building in Public, and this is launched as an experiment for Build In Public University.

I want to see if there's interest in this kind of behind-the-scenes look.

Please let me know if you have any questions! Just reach out to me on Twitter, my DMs are open! @leo_guinan