I like your style and your sentiment here. We are committed to exactly the ideals you outlined here. Tim and I are both startup founders and very product-minded engineers. Our program is less about "whipping together a cheesy iPhone app" and more about helping people learn design, product development, et al. Every engineer is put onto a team which involves planning, designing and building a product idea of their choice with plenty of mentorship along the way. We have big plans to expand curriculum in all sorts of directions. Mobile happens to be in demand and highly sought after in the valley but this is bigger than iOS training.
Thanks for the reply! I'm sure you guys will learn a ton with these initial pilot offerings. Sans the API hackery part your students will certainly learn a lot of timeless skills about practical product development and design, which is great.
There is always going to be a lot of pressure to teach surface-level skills that are in high demand due to companies who want more warm bodies to hack stuff out. Not even top universities are immune to this, just look at the spread of Java throughout top computer science schools and the proliferation of classes on OOP that are now largely irrelevant just a few years later.
I think what you are doing is great. Don't lose sight of the big picture :)
We are big fans of Hack Reactor and similar programs. I think they fill a real need for aspiring engineers who want to jump into the field.
The key differences for us are we are very focused on existing experienced engineers that want to learn new technologies in a hands-on accelerated way amongst peers. We offer our courses in the evenings around a job schedule and the courses are free of charge. Our business depends on helping those interested find jobs they love. See http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/26/job-recruiting-in-silicon-v... for more information.
"Highest quality" is a complicated thing to define but suffice to say it is in part about creating ultra high quality. We provide detailed videos, extensive wikis, hands-on projects, open-source and closed-source libraries, and extensive mentorship. We also have a process for selection of our candidates that involves a phone screen and a short in-person interview to assess background and commitment to the program.
This article might help clarify: http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/26/job-recruiting-in-silicon-v... we see this as an opportunity to fix talent development and placement in a big way. Put it this way: consider the difference between an "engineering referral" from two experienced engineers who have spent weeks with each carefully selected candidate versus other models today. We have spent quite a bit of time exploring the sustainability of this. All I ask is you reserve judgement, we have a lot of ideas of how we can make this work.
That's right, Tim and I (CodePath founders) are both startup-minded software engineers with backgrounds in product development and web and mobile development stacks.
What a great idea to go around calling other people stupid for creating personal open-source projects that they enjoy using, mocking their competence and treating them as if they should go away because they aren't as good as you. What a productive use of a developer's time.
Even stranger is the fact that harther isn't exactly a novice programmer: apparently, she's part of Mozilla [1], and wrote brain.js [2], a neural network library in JavaScript with almost 1,400 stars on GitHub.
which is doubly embarrassing for the people insulting her because odds are anyone taking the time chastising someone's hacky duct tape script as if it were a Real Thing Worth Talking About probably has no comprehension of real algorithmic work, real computer science, like that needed to implement neural nets.
Sure. My point is anyone who really seriously gets on their high horse about how great they are by looking at a simple little script that is essentially background noise for professional engineers are probably pretty far removed from even a sophomore CS undergrad level of sophistication.
Certainly, although in my experience smart , sophisticated people are by no means under-represented in the "asshole" population.
IMO the problem comes when you have people who's entire ego is based on being smart. In the past they probably had their egos massaged by getting the highest test scores in class etc and "winning" in that sense. Since the world does not work like that anymore they feel that they have to "win" at github instead.
brain looks pretty cool and I also noticed she not only works at mozilla but also regularly speaks at conferences. Weird how judging a person's competence based on looking at a single for fun open source project may not be a great idea.
