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Category Archives: Why?

Posted by heather
On Friday February 08th at 01:13 PM

Feb 08

Hey there, designers: You’re the perfect fit for HackerYou

Absolutely. CSS & HTML are designer’s tools now RT @thisishackeryou: What do you think? Do designers need to know how to code?

— Wes Bos(@wesbos) February 7, 2013

The question of whether or not designers should know how to code is an interesting one. For years, we’ve heard strong arguments from both sides. Keith Butters, co-founder of The Barbarian Group, described the back-and-forth argument succinctly in this .Net article: “You’re a designer, you do design, you let the coders code. Or alternatively, the manifestation of your work is code, so you should know how it’s done. Back. Forth.” Lots of people have written articles and blog posts on the topic. Like this one. And this one. And this one.

But really, no matter what side you’re on, it’s worth knowing that designers who do want to learn have options – even if what they’re looking for is an in-person classroom learning experience.

If you’re a designer based in the GTA who is interested in learning how to code, HackerYou’s Web Development course might be perfect for you. It’s an opportunity to learn HTML5 and CSS3 from the ground up, without ever having to leave your job (since our classes are part-time, in the evenings). The hands-on, project-based nature of the classes makes them really enjoyable, even after a long day at the office, and the 10:1 ratio of students to instructors ensures there’s always someone there to answer your questions, so the class moves fast (just how you like it). Plus, you get to learn from Wes Bos and some of Toronto’s most talented front-end developers – you’ll feel right at home.

Whether you decide to join the course because you want to make more informed web design decisions, begin presenting clients with mockups in the browser, take on more complex interaction design projects, communicate with front-end developers more effectively, or bring beautifully-designed personal or side projects to life on the web, HackerYou’s Web Development course will get you there. And, designers, we love having you!

But don’t take our word for it – here’s a list of a few of the designers who have attended HackerYou’s Web Development course led by Wes Bos, or will be joining the March 19th cohort:

Ryan Bannon | @rdbannon
Partner/Creative Director, Playground
http://playgroundinc.com

Adam Romano | @adamromano
Art Director, Playground
http://playgroundinc.com

Frank Maidens | @studiofunction
Founding Director, Studio Function
http://studiofunction.com

Marc Jenkinson | @MRCJNK
Graphic Designer, Navigator, Ltd.
http://navltd.com

Chris Gayle
Designer, Hello SOS
http://hellosos.com

Tania Fitzpatrick | @red_dotdesign
Owner/Designer/Art Director, Red Dot Design
http://reddotdesign.ca

Andrea Saxe
Graphic Designer, Schoolhouse Products
http://schoolhouseproducts.com

…plus more!

Are you a designer who is ready to learn to code? Join us this spring for a learning experience you won’t regret. Learn more and then apply before February 15th for earlybird pricing.

Posted by heather
On Saturday January 19th at 06:21 PM

Jan 19

Learn to code Startups Why?

Here’s why you’re having trouble recruiting a technical co-founder

This post was originally published by Daniel Tenner on his blog, http://swombat.com, in June 2011. To us, it sounds like yet another great reason to learn to code…

Peter Robinett makes a pretty solid case for why even (or especially) when reaching out to cool, startup-friendly developers, “ideas people” won’t necessarily encounter that much success in recruiting them to work on their startup:

Ideas are easy, execution is hard.
People approaching developers often dramatically underestimate the amount of development work, or the complexity of it.
Proposing a revenue share means the developer has to take as much risk as the idea guy (for very low pay, given the point above), and trust that the business will receive the right amount of marketing/sales follow-through.
There’s an opportunity cost to working on someone else’s idea instead of for paying clients.
The idea being proposed is often very unrealistic (and the developer, having worked on a number of such ideas, can tell).
Developers have their own ideas to work in anyway.

These points will seem blindingly obvious if you’re a developer yourself, or if you have some experience in the field, but to new startup founders, this is not so obvious.

Learn more about HackerYou’s upcoming courses here.

Posted by heather
On Wednesday January 09th at 08:29 PM

Jan 09

Learn to code Why?

Young people are screwed…here’s how to survive

This post was written by Brian Goldberg and was published on January 9, 2013 on Pandodaily.com. Learn more about Brian below.

Hey kids, you’ve all read “The Hunger Games,” right? Almost all young people have read the best-selling books or seen the Hollywood movie about Katniss Everdeen, a smart and ambitious young lady whose life prospects are diminished by historical events that predate her. What little hope she has is seemingly reduced to nil when a bunch of old people drop her into an arena and force her to fight with her fellow children in a battle royale to the death.

But that’s just fiction, right? Your loving parents and grandparents would never screw up their world and then throw you kids under the bus…or would they?

Actually, they already have.

Last week, the economics blog Calculated Risk ran a chart that tells a pretty compelling story. To an economist, this chart means that the magnitude and duration of the 2007 recession’s impact on unemployment outpaces that of any prior post-war recession. To young people, it simply means this…

You kids are screwed.

In fact, teenagers today probably aren’t old enough to remember the “Dot Bomb” recession of twelve years ago. But even at its peak, that really bad recession did not reach a level of unemployment that matched the one we are still currently experiencing. With the Federal Reserve losing its appetite for quantitative easing, the last bullet in their holster, and both political parties deciding to half-ass the fiscal policy debate, it’s safe to say that…

You kids are really screwed.

As mentioned in one of my recent articles, unemployment for young people is about double the national average. Student debt is now the single largest contributor to the nation’s credit delinquencies. And it’s one of the few debts that you can never expunge through bankruptcy. Stated differently…

You kids are so damn screwed.

Finally, young people need to understand how much their grandparents’ generation has ruined things for them. The average American retires with less than $70,000 in savings, but an elderly man and woman receive about $275,000 in medical care during that time — and you kids are paying for it by inheriting trillions upon trillions in Medicare bills that granny and grandpa never intended to pay and will be too dead to worry about soon. And you California kids can thank them for passing Proposition 13 and Proposition 30, which relieved them of having to pay taxes in favor of you having to pay even more taxes. In other words…

You kids are beyond screwed.

But there’s some good news in all of this. Some of us have already been through this “Hunger Games” melee, and we can serve as your Haymitch Abernathy — you know, the drunk, ranting mentor who teaches Katniss how to survive the great battle that awaits her.

So here are a few pieces of advice for how to navigate this terrifying world:

Lesson No. 1: In 2007, the first thing to go was the bullshit. So you better learn how to make something.

There’s a reason why unemployment is still very high, even though corporations are making record profits. It’s because after they were forced to cut about 10 percent of their workforces, many of them realized that, well, they never needed that many people to begin with.

Companies cut out the bullshit. And, unfortunately, many of the cerebral jobs that were going to ambitious young people were right in the thick of it. This included young lawyers, who pretty much can’t get jobs right now. This included young people in marketing and finance, two departments that do not bring in revenue or keep the factories running.

But guess what isn’t bullshit… making things. There are millions of unfilled jobs in America, and most of them are careers where you actually have to make and build stuff. If you grew up in an affluent environment, then you see your software engineer friends getting jobs easily. But it’s not just them. There are countless labor jobs — everything from HVAC to plumbing — that still pay big dollars. But rich kids don’t even know what those jobs entail.

My advice to young people is to figure out how to make something. That means either working with your hands, or learning how to type code with them.

Which brings me to the next lesson…

Lesson No. 2: No, education is not the answer.

If you can get into an ultra-top-tier college, then go ahead and do it. An Ivy League degree is worth getting, at least for undergrad. The value of a law or business degree is becoming more and more questionable each year.

But for the rest of you, it may be worth skipping college altogether.

The world doesn’t need any more girls with Spanish degrees from California State, Long Beach. Sorry, but it just doesn’t. We need you gals to learn how to build software in equal number with your male peers. They are no smarter than you, and they are definitely way less organized and far less attentive to detail. So go show them what you are made of.

But won’t a college degree pay for itself? It probably won’t. According to UC Berkeley’s website, a four year education will cost you $210,000 in tuition and living expenses, and a private education could run you way more. A part-time job at Starbucks will eat into very little of that sum, and you will be forgoing a real job during that same time. And — if I can convey just one point in this whole article, let it be this…saving money takes forever. Even if you do get that coveted six-figure job, you will find that it takes forever to save $210,000. Decades even.

Buy a few O’Reilly books — it will run you about 60 bucks. Go find a few software engineer friends and ask them to help you. Nerds are friendly and altruistic. And software code is no more boring and no more cryptic than learning how to conjugate your Spanish gerunds. Who knows, you may even have what it takes to start a company, but even if you don’t, you can get some valuable equity along the way.

Lesson No. 3: Your parents and grandparents don’t understand your world. You should probably ignore them.

Your parents and grandparents want what is best for you. But they do not understand your world in the slightest. You should probably ignore them.

They grew up in a world so unbelievably different from your own, that they couldn’t possibly understand what things are like for you. They don’t know what it is like to fight hard for an unpaid internship. They don’t know what it’s like to watch entire career paths suddenly disappear or become far less desirable: like Journalism, Medicine, and Law. In their day, getting a job in Medicine or Law was a ticket to prosperity. And newspapers actually hired people.

Parents and grandparents don’t understand the extent to which careers need to evolve in the modern day. No longer can you get a job at some company and expect to stay there for three decades. What you do for a living may not even exist in ten years.

Every young person is an entrepreneur now, in one way or another — they must forge their own unique career path, and they need to think five or 10 years ahead. There is no rulebook anymore for how to build a career. Certainly not the one your parents read in 1981.

In summary, the “conventional path” has become so narrow, that it hardly even exists. You can’t just go to grad school and “become” anything: a lawyer, a banker, a doctor, a journalist, a manager. Some of these jobs are on hiring freezes, and some of them are so fraught with frustration that they are best avoided. I don’t know a single doctor who thinks that Medicine is the best career path for their kids. And the same logic is applying to more and more professions. The well has been poisoned.

Lesson No. 4: Don’t worry about your network. Worry about your friends.

If you have successful friends, you will be successful. It’s pretty much that simple. If you hang out with a bunch of losers, you too will adopt their loser ways and not achieve anything. Regardless of whether or not you go out and network, please make sure that your friends are ambitious and hard working people who you admire.

For some, this means that they will have to move on from their high school buddies. For others, it means that they will need to have friends who are older than they are. Some people will have to learn new skills in order to penetrate the friend groups that they would like to join.

But if you hang out with quality people, you won’t need to worry about networking. Your friends will be your network. The only reason you are reading this article is because Sarah Lacy has a lot of friends who are very high quality, and they not only supported her PandoDaily ambition, but also put money into it. And even though she is nobody, she does have quality friends.

It works. I’ve seen it work innumerable times. Your friends bring you up or pull you down. There’s no in-between. Make sure they are pulling you up.

[Illustrations by Hallie Bateman]

Bryan Goldberg

Bryan is an entrepreneur in San Francisco. He founded Bleacher Report, and currently advises several startups. Previously, he was a failed investment banker. You can follow him on Twitter.

Posted by heather
On Tuesday December 11th at 03:49 PM

Dec 11

From a Student Web Development Why?

Guest Post: My Time at HackerYou

This is a guest post from HackerYou Web Dev (Fall 2012) student Tyn Soltys. According to her (new) website, you may know her as “that creative person who finally decided to do something about it.” You can find out more about her here: http://tynsoltys.com/

You know when you get a really good feeling about something, and you can’t stop thinking about it day and night, and finally work up the courage to just go for it? No, it was not love, but how I felt when I learned about HackerYou, and enrolling turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

HackerYou has not only turned me into an amateur (hoping to become professional) Swiss Army knife of a front-end web developer, but has been hands-down one of the greatest educational experiences of my life – and as a relatively nerdy person who never really liked going to class, this is saying a lot. This is what “class” should be. Before I knew it I was looking forward to Monday and Thursday nights more than weekends. I’d like to say I’m joking, but not really.

When I met with Heather before the course begun, she explained to me how this was not about marks – it was about taking what YOU want out of the course. Well. I have not only gotten an incredible education in all things front-end development, but the amount and quality of support from amazing mentors and instructors is what really sets HackerYou apart. No question goes unanswered, no student ever feels left behind. Students readily help each other out too, and not just with course work – the class is filled with an incredible roster of students, many of them entrepreneurs, designers, and leaders in their field, but all super creative and interesting people. Everyone is approachable and openly shares their expertise with others, and it really feels like more like a team meeting than a class (I’m not being cliché, it’s actually how it is – and if you read Heather’s idea of what she envisioned HackerYou to be, she hit it right on the head, so that deserves an incredible congratulations, too. Amazing job, and thank you.)

Led by the illustrious and #bada55 Wes Bos, two nights a week at the Centre for Social Innovation in the Annex (another incredible place, definitely check it out) class typically begins with a review of last class’ content, followed by the introduction of shiny new content. We work through several examples together, and a few on our own, and are then given a bit of time to think and absorb all the crazy stuff we just learned and ask a ton of questions. Wes’ lessons are well thought out and full of wise wisdom, and there’s always some sort of “loot bag” of cool links or resources for us to use, many of which have become invaluable tools and favourite new morning coffee reading. Classes are very rarely overwhelming, but when they are, it’s just the nature of the content to blame (hello relative/absolute positioning). In that case, we aren’t allowed to leave until we understand everything (just kidding), but seriously, thanks to the mentors’ genuine interest in helping us learn, by the end of the night all of us were making some pretty cool collages and overlapping craziness from primary coloured squares. I’m now working on some really cool CSS3 “toys” that definitely, definitely take advantage of that lesson.

I am actually quite sad that it’s over. I was never one for going to class much (ask my friends at university) but that’s because I rarely ever felt class taught me more than what I could just learn on my own. I know for certain that I would be nowhere near the level I am at now if it wasn’t for the intelligence of the curriculum, the incredible support of the instructors and mentors, and my truly inspiring classmates of the inaugural HackerYou class. Not only is class actually fun, but I can see its benefits clearly, especially when I open up the sites that I’ve made and really wish my Mom could hang them on the fridge. Web development is truly one field where watching online tutorials (though absolutely essential) won’t really tie everything together so nicely, or learn things in the right order, and be told that “well actually, that’s one of those things that they’re (the w3) are working on, so you’re not going to find the answer, instead, try this…” – do you know how big of a time and sanity saver that is?

So – if you’re thinking about signing up for a development course or for HackerYou specifically, and you genuinely want to learn, know that it is perhaps one of the most worthwhile investments you can make. It’s a fun, efficient, and top-quality educational experience. Whether you just want to understand web development for your job or personal interest, want to create that blog or other pet project you’ve been dreaming about, or want to start a career in web-development (like apparently I do now!), I couldn’t recommend anything so strongly as I do HackerYou.

(No, they did not pay me to write this. Seriously, this is from the heart.)

With tremendous thanks to Wes, Heather and the HackerYou team,

Tyn

Posted by heather
On Tuesday December 04th at 07:29 PM

Dec 04

Big Data Marketing Programming Ruby on Rails Why?

Why Marketers Will Rule The World: Rise of the Marketing Technologist

This post was written by Maggie Fox, Founder/CEO and CMO of Social Media Group. It was originally published by Social Media Today.

The average lifespan of the CMO has increased from 23 months in 2006 to over 43 months in 2012. Forbes magazine suggests this is a reflection of the growing strategic nature of the role – and there’s enormous opportunity to solidify this position by delivering measurable business results, thanks to big data. Technology is playing an important role in this. By 2017, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan predicts that CMOs will spend more money on technology than CIOs.

At the moment, however, most marketers are falling down on the job – badly, especially when it comes to technology. A recent survey from ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketingpaints a stark picture of marketers and their ownership of their own technology choices:

•    59% don’t specify marketing technology
•    45% don’t recommend marketing technology
•    46% don’t select marketing technology
•    15% DON’T HAVE ANY SAY AT ALL

This is a shockingly hands-off approach, and one that could very well come back and bite you if you allow it to continue. Just this past weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that suggested CIOs, not CMOs, should be responsible for digital leadership in most organizations. The article predicted that a new role, The Chief Digital Officer, would fall to IT because “IT is everywhere”. Russell Reynolds, one of the world’s top recruiting companies, describes the CDO as “[someone] who can oversee the full range of digital strategies and drive change across the organization.” (I don’t know about you, but that sounds like something marketing should own).

And it’s not just technology where marketers’ chops are being questioned: it’s also the ability to deliver business and operational intelligence (real-time insight into business performance); two things that are of enormous value to the entire organization, and two things that marketing is uniquely well-positioned to deliver in the digital age because of your access to that same massive data stream. In July, Oracle released a survey of more than 300 US and Canadian executives that showed 93% of them believe they’re losing revenue because they aren’t able to access or act on information already available to them. And they are missing out on something – the New York Times recently referenced a study of 179 large companies that found those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains of up to 6% – that couldn’t be explained any other way.

So what’s your opportunity? To blend the “Art and Science” of marketing; the art is the storytelling (something you’re so very good at) and the science is the technology and strategic business value that you can deliver by leveraging big data generated by social media and other customer interactions online. This is a wellspring of fantastic intelligence, if you have the technologies and skillsets to process and analyze it. In Inc. Magazine, Brian Halligan recently described it as delivering to a “segment of one” – think about sites like Netflix and Amazon, which use a combination of individual leverage (the more I use the site, the more it learns about me) and group leverage (the more people like me use the site, the better the site can predict what I may want or like) to deliver a better customized, higher-revenue experience.

There are many examples of marketers who have leveraged big data in order to deliver business value. Steve McKee, who writes for BusinessWeek, has written about how his team took a look at simple web metrics and their relationships, the increases and decreases in media buys, and used that data to increase the effectiveness of a clients’ media spend by 9%. Pamplin College in the U.S. did a large-scale study to see what the relationship was between social media mentions and automotive recalls, and found a direct, predictive connection.

One of the biggest challenges behind turning social media data into business and operational intelligence is the need to make structured and unstructured data play nicely together (structured data is the stuff that’s easy to put into a database – often things like sales numbers, or numbers of clicks; things that are easy to count and don’t require any interpretation. Unstructured data, however, are text-heavy, things like conversations and facts. Unstructured data is irregular and requires analysis to be understood by everyone – it’s complicated). This will require skillsets you are unlikely to see in a typical marketing department today (unless you’re Target). McKinsey predicts that in the U.S. alone, right now there’s a need for 200,000 people with skillsets in data analytics. And the way you attack data will also need to change; Avinash Kaushik, Google’s digital marketing evangelist says that the ideal breakdown for big data resources should be 15% data capture, 20% reporting and 65% analysis. At the moment, for most of us, that’s flipped, with most resources devoted to capture and very little to analysis and actionable insight.

So what’s next? Like many others, I think it’s the age of the Marketing Technologist – the person who, in the words of Scott Brinker, is “Someone who has a hybrid between business and technology, a strong background in engineering and IT, is an early adopter of technology, but someone who also understands the pragmatic realities of scaling technology. But most importantly, someone who brings those skills and combines them with a deep love and passion for the marketing mix. This is a technologist that reports to the CMO, not the CIO.”

What do you think? And, even more importantly – are you ready?

[A note from Heather: If you ask me, this sounds like a great reason for marketers to learn to code! Check out our upcoming Ruby on Rails course for an exciting opportunity to learn to code after work hours beginning in January 2013.]

Posted by heather
On Tuesday November 20th at 12:36 PM

Nov 20

Programming Ruby on Rails Why?

10 reasons why you should learn Ruby on Rails

This post was originally written by Justin James for Tech Republic.

Takeaway: There are plenty of compelling reasons to check out Ruby on Rails — like the development model, the job market, and the abundance of good IDEs.

Ruby on Rails has been out now for a number of years, but lately its popularity has gone up quite a bit. I recently started digging deeply into Rails and the Rails ecosystem, and I found a lot to like. Here are 10 reasons why you should consider learning Rails.

1. The Ruby language itself

The Ruby language is pretty impressive. It combines some of the best features of dynamic languages, while taking some of the best ideas from strongly typed, static languages and blending them with an object-oriented paradigm that is focused on “getting things done” and not “writing lots of code.” The Ruby language is an excellent language, and you may very well find it makes you quite productive.

2. Code-based data model

In Ruby on Rails, you define your data model with code. In fact, once the initial data model is made, any changes to it are made through scripts that manipulate the model. While this may feel a little unusual, it means that it is trivial to replicate a Rails project on another server or even target it against another database.

3. Open source

Rails (and Ruby) are not just “open source,” they have a thriving, helpful community around them. Although the magic of open source is often overstated, the reality of Ruby and Rails is close to the ideal, which is great for new developers.

4. Well documented

You may not see a row of Ruby or Rails books at your local bookstore, but Ruby and Rails are both well documented. I’ve been very impressed by the amount of video tutorials available on the Web, both for free and for pay. Not only are there lots of these tutorials, but they are often of high quality, fun to follow, and much more effective than most books.

5. Good jobs

Rails may not have a pile of open positions, but the Rails jobs I have seen advertised all look attractive. I’ve talked to a number of recruiters and people running Rails shops, and the general attitude is that the superior efficiency allows them to pay a bit more and still save money. Also, the lack of experts means that they often employ people who work from home or otherwise get benefits that a .NET or Java developer would be hard pressed to get.

6. Rapid development model

The Rails development model depends upon convention, not configuration. This means that if you learn to do things the way Rails expects you to do them, it will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. This applies to a wide variety of development tasks, and as long as you keep yourself from trying to micromanage Rails, you can work very quickly in it.

7. Direct access to the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

Rails makes no presumptions about how to turn your logic into output. Instead, you get 100% control over the presentation layer of your code. This makes tying your application’s logic to AJAX’ed front ends mighty easy. It also allows you to work closely with design experts, to produce nice looking sites that are difficult to do in less-flexible systems.

8. Vendor support

Is Rails available on every host out there? Not at all. But most hosts do offer it now. Even better, a number of them now specialize in Rails hosting and can provide a high level of service and support. In fact, Engine Yard employs a significant number of developers who are core members of the Rails and Ruby teams, giving them a massive amount of in-house knowledge of the product. As a result of specialization, you can get great help from these vendors, in stark contrast to the experience that most vendors typically provide.

9. Tool options

The relative simplicity of the Rails system means that there are already a number of good IDEs for Rails development. In addition to IDEs, the Rails ecosystem is filled with excellent tools that fill just about any need you may have, and most of them are free and/or open source. If you want to work in an ecosystem with topflight tools support, Rails is a good place to be.

10. Better fit

There is something distinct about the Rails philosophy (and toolset) in comparison to the Java or .NET environments. If you are the type of person who “thinks in code” and likes to work with scripts to get things done, Rails may be a great fit for you. While the focus on command-line tools may feel like a quaint anachronism, this mode of working simply suits some people better. There is a good possibility that you will find yourself very comfortable working in the Rails style, and it is worth your time to check it out.

Your take

Have you worked with Ruby on Rails? What did you like/dislike the most?

Posted by heather
On Thursday November 08th at 12:15 PM

Nov 08

From a Student Learn to code Web Development Why?

My Journey to (and through) HackerYou

This post was contributed by Michelle Pomeroy – she’s one of the 30 students currently enrolled in our Web Development course! Learn more about her below!

It never fails to amaze me how one event in life leads to another and before you know it, you’re coding websites. That’s the short version of my journey to HackerYou. The longer version is that a Mozilla Hack Jam (designed for teachers) led to discussions about Ladies Learning Code, which lead to participating in workshops through Ladies Learning Code, at which point I discovered HackeYou’s Introduction to Web Development course. I never thought life would lead me here, as it completely different from anything that I have done previously. However, I cannot help but think I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.

After working full-time as a teacher for a few years, I admit, it was a debate as to whether I should take a course in the evenings, particularly when I knew that I would be learning a plethora of new information that is not technically “in my field”. I wondered if I could handle the extra hours required of me while working full-time, as well as keep up with all the new concepts. My previous programs in university consisted of courses related to the social sciences and child development, with the expectation that you keep up on academic journals, write papers and study for multiple-choice exams. I feel like these programs were something I did because I “fell into” them and they were a natural progression – not because I was necessarily passionate about them. HackerYou opened up new doors for me – doors that were not necessarily closed before, but previously non-existent in my life.

There are times now that I’m up until 2 am working on an HTML/CSS project (I find myself unable to sleep until I’ve worked out the kinks, although I’ve heard it can be better to “sleep on it”) and yes, sometimes I have the urge to throw my computer against the wall in frustration; however, after being in school for twenty plus years, I can honestly say that I’ve finally found something I’m truly passionate about. I finally found something that I can see myself doing for years to come, whether it’s in the form of a full-time job or as a hobby. Thank you, HackerYou, for giving me a second chance at my career and providing me with the skills needed to pursue my passion. Can it be done if you work full-time? Of course. Can it be done if you’ve had no previous experience? Absolutely.

[From Heather: Our next 3-month Web Development course begins on March 19th, 2013. Click here to learn more about the two parts: Intro to Web Development and Intro to Responsive Design. Ready to apply? Click here.]

ABOUT MICHELLE POMEROY

Michelle Pomeroy is currently a full-time Special Education teacher at a unique independent school in Mississauga, Ontario. In her spare time, she enjoys reading for hours on end, watching horror/science-fiction movies, listening to music, attending concerts, practicing Taekwondo and partaking in workshops on a variety of topics, including science-fiction writing, film direction and improvisation. She hopes to continue to take web development classes to one day become a web developer using the super-awesome skills she has obtained through Hacker You.

Posted by heather
On Tuesday November 06th at 04:05 PM

Nov 06

Learn to code Programming Why?

Could coding be the next mass profession?

This post was originally published by Roy Bahat on his blog, Also.

Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value.

Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get any advanced degree. In the past, students who missed out on a higher education learned vocational skills – but this stuttered as we moved to an information economy. Today, students without a higher education generally enter service professions or trades where employment, if they can get it, doesn’t offer much career growth.

There is a new opportunity emerging for young people to do productive, entrepreneurial, satisfying work: they can learn to code. Code isn’t that hard to start to learn – one outsourcing firm takes people with no training and makes them full-time Java programmers in 3 months. (Of course, mastery takes tremendous talent and craft.) Coding isn’t expensive – with netbooks, cloud hosting and storage, and open source software. Beyond a certain point, coders are self-taught, and can continue to advance their skills.

They’re handing out Gutenberg printing presses out there: with services like Treehouse (I’m a dues-paying member) and Codecademy (and its expertly-timed year of code), countless university courses free online, Google Code University, the warm embrace of Stack Overflow, in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp,summer camps for kids, even the promise of a one-day result withDecoded (the six-minute abs of learning to code), and great organizations like CodeNow (which I’ve been supporting) reaching out to teach code in underserved communities. I’m sure I’ve left many out.

Yet very few high school students learn to code. Almost no high schools teach code as part of the curriculum. Though of course they should — code is literacy, not (just) a specialist skill. And kids can get started coding early. Many students who would be terrific at coding, a creative, tinkering act, also may not thrive in institutional (school) environments.

There is real demand for coders – even despite overall unemployment – so learning to code produces rewards quickly. Online marketplaces like oDesk and Elance hire starting programmers at rates as high as $15-20 an hour or more. Learning to code is one of the best paths to entrepreneurship. Coding also offers students the joy of creation and mastery of a complex skill. Code may one day be a basic workplace expectation– like emailing, or “proficient in Word.” Young people are also willing to learn: coding now has a brand. The kid who writes an iPhone or Android app, these days, gets the girl (or boy!).

It might even be possible to do more than just learn to code – but also to become an elite coder – without necessarily going to college. We are in the early days of teaching code as a profession. Most academic training is focused on teaching students theory, not practice. (One Ivy League computer science program only required one course where students actually write code.) Imagine if students who might not otherwise even attend college could become elite coders.

In the U.S., the STEM line of thinking is about creating the next generation of scientists. In computing, this is even reflected in what we call the study of programming — computer “science.” We could be doing something different (and complementary), teaching students to be makers, not scientists: creating the next generation who can hack, beget, get paid right away, and maybe become entrepreneurs. Learning this would make the high school experience more rewarding, because it would have an immediate result. (I went to a high school with a vocational tradition, Stuyvesant in New York, and wish I had more courses like the architectural drafting class I took for a year.)

I’ve become personally passionate about this idea over the last couple of years. I think it could be a path to helping fix a lot of what doesn’t work right now: our ways of teaching students, powering our economy’s future, and making work a creative and fulfilling way to spend time.

I’m sure there are many more out there working on this — if you’re one of them, hit me up and let’s find a way to make common cause. And if you think I’m crazy, tell me why.

Posted by heather
On Thursday November 01st at 09:18 PM

Nov 01

From a Student Learn to code Ruby on Rails Why?

Why I’m Signed Up for HackerYou’s 72-Hour Rails Course

This post was contributed by Alan Judson – he’s one of the 30 students that will be joining us at our Intro to Rails course in January! Learn more about that course here, and learn more about Alan below!

I have a secret. At night, when the kids are in bed and my wife is out at the coffee shop doing some freelance work, I am on the internet learning to code. I love learning new things and, especially, I love becoming very good at them. I don’t always succeed, though. I never did manage to teach myself Latin (or French, or Spanish, or Korean, for that matter). Things I’ve taught myself (with great success) include several musical instruments and Microsoft Excel. The things I’ve had success with have something in common: instant feedback. Excel provides a dizzying array of error messages, and musical instruments, well, I’m sure you’ve heard a beginner guitar player (or, worst-case scenario, violinist). Without feedback, self-study is a struggle.

Self-studying in the programming world is easier than ever: there’s Codeschool, Codecademy, Rubymonk, and TryRuby, just to name a few. To get feedback on why something isn’t working, though, you often have to search through the haystack of Google and Stackoverflow. It’s awesome that they exist, and I’ve gotten pretty far that way. But, you know what’s better than that? Putting up your hand and having a passionate teacher explain it. A good teacher can smooth out the learning curve and even help you dodge the hours of set up required before you can even start coding.

I heard about HackerYou through a blog that listed programming crash courses, and was excited to see that there was one offered in Toronto! It was too late to register for HackerYou’s first three-month course, so I sulked a bit, but then discovered a three-hour “Intro to Ruby on Rails” workshop that they were running (just like this one). I’ll tell you why it suited me perfectly.

Everyone at HackerYou wants you to succeed. The instructors are full-time, working-in-the-business professionals that use this stuff every day. With a student-to-instructor ratio of 10:1, the workshop was super helpful. The instructors answered three months’ worth of my internet forum questions in three hours (and minus the snark). Just think how excited I was when HackerYou announced a three-month, 72-hour Ruby on Rails course that will be running from Jan 21 – April 18^th2012 (Mondays and Thursdays, 6:30 – 9:30 pm). Hint: I was elated.

I’ll end with a comparative study on my experiences with applying to university vs. HackerYou. I thought university was going to be Dead Poets Society. It wasn’t. It was closer to the Pink Floyd “The Wall” end of the spectrum (but not as catchy).

Application to University:

Essay
Boatloads of paperwork
Mean administrators holding up the process over a lower case “j” left undotted.
Hundreds of dollars to apply!

Application to HackerYou

Two-minute online application (free)
Thirty-minute, congenial coffee meeting with Heather to see if it’s going to be a good fit for both parties, which covered the following sub-topics:
1. A comprehensive overview of what the course experience will be like
2. A demo of the apps you will build during the course (Hacklendar & Hackboard) – along with assurances that the instructors will help you to customize them to fit your vision
3. Loads of examples of HackerYou’s connections to Toronto’s tech world
4. A surprise bonus: students enrolled in HackerYou’s three-month courses receive free access to all of HackerYou workshops for the duration of the course – you could learn something new almost every day of the week, if you wanted!

If you’re stuck in a study loop and have a day job, apply to join this upcoming course. I’ll see you at the Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams not included.

ABOUT ALAN JUDSON

Alan Judson, of Hamilton, ON, has a life of a thousand simple pleasures. A daytime data analyst, he fills his summer nights as a bluegrass musician playing in small pubs and every pig roast in the area (bluegrass and bacon, anyone?). He has an insatiable urge to learn, and a special obsession for looking up words in the dictionary. As a habitual autodidact (looked up this word today), he can’t wait to throw himself (further) into web programming. He’s in his glory, though, goofing around with his devastatingly gorgeous kids and spending time with his best friend, his high school sweetheart – awwwwww!

Posted by heather
On Tuesday September 11th at 10:03 AM

Sep 11

Learn to code Programming Startups Why?

If You Want To Be The Donald Trump Of Startups, Learn To Code

This post was originally published on September 11th by Fast Company. Written by Rob Spectre.

The Donald built an empire because he knew what every piece and process cost him. If you can’t say the same for your software, you won’t.

Programming is a practical application of abstract math combining esoteric theory with experiential practice. And learning it can be every bit as brain-scramblingly incomprehensible and front-row-seat-for-Celine-Dion tedious as the previous sentence suggests.

But, if you want to start a technology company, you should learn to code. And the reason is Donald Trump.

Say whatever you want about the man (and, as a New Yorker, I can say plenty), Donald Trump achieved no small level of success in the real estate business. His real estate portfolio stretching from sea to shining sea, including a good-sized chunk of Manhattan, skyline causing Forbes to estimate his worth at $2.9 billion. He sits at #134 of that publication’s list of wealthiest people in the United States, fomenting a serious bit of celebrity and funding a less serious flirtation with the White House. All this without the ability to get through a press conference with a single complete sentence or eat a New York slice correctly. How is a man whose public image is punctuated by obtuseness able to out-earn quite nearly anybody who reads this article by orders of magnitude?

If you were to ask him the secret to his success, he would point to a competitive edge handed down to him by his father: he knew what everything cost. Meaning he could look at a foundation and given its size, the type of concrete used, the techniques involved and a few other factors, Trump’s old man had a rough sense of how much he should pay. His son often says that knowledge–the knowledge of what everything costs–is the linchpin of the Trump empire’s success. When looking at that ability across all that goes into real estate development, it is little wonder.

Demolition, architecture, plumbing, electrical work, heating, air conditioning, permits, labor, interior design, lumber, dry wall, 12 foot tall golden letters spelling your own last name–Trump’s big edge is he knows the going rate for all of it. There are hundreds of details that go into turning a hunk of capital into a building; Donald Trump wins because he knows what all those details cost. And his competitors don’t.

Reconsider, then, why you should learn to program as a non-technical founder. In our current environment, your most precious resource is not money–it is time. With a macroeconomy still allocating capital to angel and venture at a rate disproportionate with the risk those asset classes represent, a wealth of cloud services that bring down the capital expenditure needed to build a software company to near zero, and a market for developer talent hotter than the surface of the Sun, days of developer time have eclipsed American dollars as the most valuable commodity in the startup game.

Why learn how to program? Because you’ll learn how much time everything should take. Will sharing content on Facebook take more time than authenticating with Twitter? Is it more development effort to implement a recommendation engine or add full-text search? If a developer hands you a login page written in an afternoon, is it quality work? Will rewriting the site in Ruby really only take three months?

It is true what they say about learning to code–it is easier or cheaper than ever before. But for the born hustler well removed from college whose recollection of algebra is as fuzzy as the name of the junior high cafeteria lady, programming is still a damn difficult thing to get a handle on. The difficulty curve from understanding programming fundamentals like variables and conditional logic to producing your first web page is steeper than the hockey stick growth you’re expecting with your company. Scaling this mountain is further complicated by the realities of coding for a modern Web where–bare minimum–you’ll need comprehension of four different languages to do anything and five if you want to do anything important. And this is to say nothing of the hundred odd operational obstacles you’ll also need to hurdle to get the code from your laptop to a domain name where anyone on the Internet can pay you with a credit card.

However, if you do learn to program, you–not your technical co-founder, not your first engineering hire, but you–will have a good sense of the answer. You may not be able to do it yourself, but you will have a far better sense of how long it would take for a professional. You will know what software costs. And in the startup business, the people who know what software costs tend to be the biggest winners.

Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Larry Page. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. By the time they were billionaires, they were each likely as useful committing code as they were mopping the floor. But when any of them were presented with a feature, they knew about how much development time it should take. And the knowledge of that cost coupled with their singular intuition for their customers’ needs and vision for the market propelled them to the decisions that would build world-changing companies.

The bald truth is learning to program is still hard, despite recent gains in accessibility. And to pile on to the bad news, programming is a lot harder for a father to pass to his son than a contractor’s proposal. The only way you can ever learn how much time development is going to take–how much the software you wish to build will cost–is by building some yourself.

There are few CEOs who know the cost of building great software. Those who do hold a stark competitive advantage over the legions who don’t. And if there is anything we could possibly learn from a guy like Donald Trump, that edge can be all you need to build a fortune.

Rob Spectre hacks at Twilio, blogs at Brooklyn Hacker, and tweets @dN0t.

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