While each of the students rightfully expected to walk away with a brand new skill set by the end of the three-month course, I’m not sure they understood just how far they would come over the course of the next twelve weeks. But here we are, a couple of weeks after Demo Day, and it’s safe to say that many of us all still a little in awe about the amazing progress that was made and the quality of new-found talents that were gained.

Instead of telling you about all of the incredible projects, connections and friendships that came out of this course, I wanted to let a few of our awesome students (and their kick-ass projects) speak for themselves:

AVALANCHE (click for demo)

The team behind Avalanche includes Meredith Underell, an aspiring Ruby on Rails developer, Michelle Pomeroy, a special education teacher, and Emily Gutierrez, a web developer. Here is what they had to say about their HackerYou experience:

Why did you decide to apply to HackerYou?

Meredith: I wanted to learn more about Ruby on Rails and I knew that HackerYou was an amazing organization.

Michelle: I decided to apply for Hacker You because I took part in a Ladies Learning Code HTML & CSS workshop three months prior and absolutely loved it.  I then looked into whether or not they offered more in-depth courses, discovered HackerYou and ended up taking both courses that HackerYou currently offers.

Emily: I attendedHackerYou’s Intro to Web Development in the fall last year. I applied because my contract as a web producer at my old job had just ended and in order to make myself more hireable I knew I needed to gain more web development skills. HackerYou’s part-time hours also attracted me because if I ended up getting a job while taking the course I knew I wouldn’t have to drop it. After graduating from HackerYou’s web development course, I applied to HackerYou’s Intro to Ruby on Rails because I fell in love with web development and thought it would be a great asset to understand Ruby on Rails.

What did you enjoy most about HackerYou?

Meredith: The people (I have new life long friends!) & building our own projects.

Michelle: I really enjoy learning in an environment in which success is not measured based on test scores but on internal motivation to do well and learn a new skill.  I also enjoyed the sense of community among the students, instructors and mentors.

Emily: I enjoyed the environment the most. It was a fun, positive, laid back environment where people helped and supported each other.

What was your favourite part of creating your project?

Meredith: Getting to work through a really complex project which helped us understand the concepts better. Also, having some sushi & code nights with my project teammates was always a blast!

Michelle: My favourite part of creating the project is working with my friends toward a common goal, and also the feeling of success when a light bulb suddenly goes off and you understand (or figure out) something that you were not able to previously.

Emily: Working with my group was the best part of creating this project. We worked hard, but the best part was that we had a lot of fun doing it!

HACKSIGHTER (click for demo)

HackSighter is the brainchild of Naomi Matsuura, a scientist who specializes in using nanotechnology to devise innovative solutions in the field of medical imaging. Here is what Naomi had to say about her time at HackerYou:

Why did you decide to apply to HackerYou?

I have long been curious about web-based programming, but with a busy job, it did not seem feasible for me to learn how to program via more “traditional” routes (i.e., via part-time university or college courses).  HackerYou appealed to me because it gave me the opportunity to take part in an intensive, challenging and applied web-programming course that was also geared towards new students with little programming experience.  This combination is difficult to find, and the high teacher-to-student ratio allowed all the students to push their boundaries as well as learn material very specific to their needs.

What did you enjoy most about HackerYou?

I really enjoyed meeting so many amazing and motivated people through the HackerYou course.  The instructors, mentors and my classmates really inspired me during the course itself, and being exposed to everyone and their energy and ideas continues to push and inspire me to continue self-learning now that the course is complete.  I feel privileged to have met such a great group of people through this course!

What was your favourite part of creating your project?

My favourite part of creating my project was the excitement I felt when I was able to implement the lessons from our class into our my own app.  It was amazing and incredibly satisfying that with so little experience, we were able to create something that could work and be demonstrated within such a short period of time (albeit with a lot of help from our instructors).

TIMEtoOR (click for demo)

Giles Cruickshanks is an anesthisiologist who saw a need to find a better way for operating room staff to communicate better for emergency surgery booking. Here is what he said to say about bringing an idea to life through HackerYou:

Why did you decide to apply to HackerYou?

I have been in love with computers since age 10. I have a degree in Computer Science from Western University (Class of ’91). Then I went to Medical School and currently work as an Anesthesiologist at Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket. Over the years, I built a few applications for physician billing and scheduling. I took some time away from work to commercialize my physician scheduling software that schedules about 60 physicians at two hospitals.

A nursing colleague and I presented our project TimeToOR at www.HackingHealth.ca in October 2012 (we were voted #4 out of 68 projects). We met some awesome people at HackingHealth, especially Sherry-Lyn Lee and Audrey Kuo who are working on www.iamsick.ca. They were programming in Ruby on Rails and it seemed really cool, so I googled ‘Ruby on Rails’ courses and found HackerYou. The last programming I had done was in MS Access 2003/Visual Basic with some minimal HTML experience.

What did you enjoy most about HackerYou?

I enjoyed it all!  Heather is great and was very welcoming even though I am perhaps not the typical background or age group for such a course. The instructors from Influitive were amazing. Clearly very high-end programmers with a wealth of knowledge but able to effectively share and teach the subject. I attended a few Ruby Hack nights at Influitive’s office and even played my first ever ‘geeky board game’ at their  monthly meetup.

The other students in the class were fascinating. Such a diverse group of students – a scientist, statistician, a few entrepreneurs, special education teacher, a satirical news website blogger.  Everyone had great ideas for their personal projects. I think my favourite was Danny’s ‘PowerMove’ – it’s a term I’m adding to my vocabulary. The small class size made me feel like I was  a part of a special group.  I really looked forward to every class (and I drove over an hour one way for each class).

What was your favourite part of creating your project?

Ruby on Rails is awesome. I used Twilio to real time SMS message and call the OR team. Ryan, Brad and Enric solved any roadblock I had within minutes. It was rewarding to see an idea become reality. I am continuing to work on some new applications at the hospital to help integrate technology into a much needed area.

STALKER

This app was created by Zhi Hui Tai, Project Manager at Influitive. We asked Zhi to share her thoughts on HackerYou, and this is what she had to say:

Why did you decide to apply to HackerYou?

Working alongside engineers everyday has made me want to create things of my own for a long time. When I heard that my co-workers Ryan and Brad from Influitive were going to teach a intro Ruby on Rails class in HackerYou, I was on board immediately.

What did you enjoy most about HackerYou?

I’ve tried sites like Codecademy and Udemy which have really great content but having a structured class environment made it really disciplined for me. The friendly instructors and classmates played a huge part in creating a great synergy in class too!

Being able to see through the development from ideation to fruition was really satisfying for me, although I received a lot of help in between.

POWER MOVES (click for demo)

Brought to you by Danny Cohen, Head of Consumer Marketing at Google Canada, Power Moves helps you make the right choices on everything from the best pizza in town to your next furniture purchase.

I’ve been in a marketing role at Google for over three years. I work very closely with Product Managers and Engineers and wanted to learn the more technical side of the world. Plus I love building things, so this seemed like the right place to get started with programming.

Before this, all my attempts at learning to code failed because I was working solo. The best part of HackerYou was having a community of other people also trying to learn coding from the ground up. The teaching was also fantastic. And Heather and team were extremely flexible, always looking for the best way to adapt aspects of the course to make sure we were getting the most out of it.

Taking an idea in my head and turning it into a working prototype in 3 weeks with my new skillz.

HOCKEY DRAFT

Steve Organ, a Project Manager at Influitive, joined the Ruby on Rails course to build on his basic knowledge of code. Judging by his awesome hockey draft app – he did just that!

Why did you decide to apply to HackerYou?

I always wanted to learn how to program. Prior to the course, I knew how to copy and paste code and work with it, however I wanted more knowledge in how to program and build a web application. I work in product management as well, and although the level of technical expertise is not required for the function, I thought learning Ruby would be useful to empathize with my team.

What did you enjoy most about HackerYou?

The amazing instructors, I learned so much in a couple of months it is crazy.

What was your favourite part of creating your project?

Making my application real-time – allowing the user to get real-time updates without having to refresh the page. I loved how easy and awesome it was to leverage and integrate open source code into my project.

HAMMER IN THE NEWS (demo)

Next up from Alan Judson, Data Analyst at Sanimax, comes an online news site. Here is what Alan had to say when we asked him about his HackerYou experience:

Why did you decide to apply to HackerYou?

I want to make awesome apps and websites.  It’s a great career move for an analyst to learn coding. Also, my friend and I started Hammer in the News – a satirical news website covering Hamilton news – and I wanted to make a custom site.  Right now I’m making two other apps.  A music theory app and an inventory app for my company.

The post Ruby on Rails Project Showcase appeared first on HackerYou.

(Also, thanks to Shopify, we have a number of scholarships and travel bursaries available for talented applicants to the Summer Academy program. Sign up to learn more: http://eepurl.com/xg4J1)

And now, here are the five reasons we’re most excited about HackerYou Summer Academy 2013:

1. We’re just getting started and so far, the applicants are awesome.

HackerYou always attracts awesome people. From designers to marketers to doctors to teachers to consultants to scientists to students to entrepreneurs to community managers, we’ve had them all. And more! Diversity is one of the things that makes HackerYou different, and great. We’re proud to be the most diverse programming bootcamp in the world.

It’s already clear that Summer Academy is going to be no different. Of the applications we’ve received so far, 75% are from outside Canada. And more than 50% consider themselves to be part of a group that is typically underrepresented in the technology industry. (Yes, we track that.)

We’re also collecting information from people who would like to be informed when we open up applications for scholarships and travel bursaries. That group is even more diverse. I just can’t wait to start interviewing everyone. It’s one of the best parts of my job at HackerYou.

(If you’d like to sign up to be informed when scholarship and bursary applications open, please click here: http://eepurl.com/xg4J1)

2. Ruby on Rails is awesome.

Summer Academy will be HackerYou’s second time offering a Ruby on Rails course. We have a three-month, part-time Ruby on Rails course happening right now in Toronto. Led by Ryan Brunner and Brad Robertson from Influitive, I can say for a matter of fact that the course is amazing. I know because I’ve been participating as a student. Partially because familiarity with our Ruby on Rails course content is going to make future HackerYou courses (like Summer Academy) better, and partially because, well, the whole reason I started Ladies Learning Code and HackerYou was because I wanted to learn to code.

Learning Ruby on Rails at HackerYou has been an incredible experience. I feel like I finally understand from both a theoretical and hands-on perspective how people create the software we all use every day. And even though I have miles to go, knowing how to create an application that will turn any idea I may have into reality is within reach. In fact, the rest of the participants and I are already doing it.

For example, as our final class project, fellow participant, Dan Kalmar and are building an app for booking meeting rooms in offices. Outside of class, participants Meredith Underell and Emily Gutierrez and I (under the expert guidance of HackerYou mentor Rebecca Putinski) are now rebuilding the Ladies Learning Code job board. Having the skills to build software to solve problems in your own life and beyond is incredibly rewarding and I can’t wait to have another awesome group of people realize and embrace this at HackerYou Summer Academy this year.

3. Shopify is awesome.

We are pumped to have Shopify on board as a partner for HackerYou’s first Summer Academy. They are awesome. Just take a look at their careers page and try to tell me that, even if you’re happily employed, a small part of you doesn’t want to work there. They’re an incredible company, an amazing Canadian startup success story, and their office is absolutely overflowing with talent. And HackerYou Summer Academy will be hosted right in the middle of it all – in Shopify’s community space. Developers, designers, product managers, business anaylsts, members of the Executive Team and many of the rest of Shopify’s 141 employees will be in and out of the space every day. You’ll feel the energy. Yes, nine weeks of full-time coding will be grueling, but doing it out of Shopify’s office, with guidance and support from some of Shopify’s best, is going to be pretty darn motivating.

4. We’re able to offer scholarships and travel bursaries for the first time.

Thanks to Shopify, we’re able to offer a number of scholarships and travel bursaries to successful applicants to Summer Academy.  It’s one of the coolest things about Summer Academy, and it was entirely Shopify’s idea. As a company, they really care. It’s ingrained in their culture. They support countless initiatives in Ottawa (including one of my own) and now they’re helping to make Summer Academy not only the most diverse programming bootcamp in the world, but also the most accessible. How cool is that?!

To be notified when scholarship applications open, please sign up here.

5. We’re turning things up a notch. Or ten.

In Toronto, we’ve had tons of success running part-time courses in Web Development and Ruby on Rails. People are getting new jobs, landing promotions, negotiating raises, taking on new responsibilities, and doing freelance work full-time or on the side, all because of the skills and confidence that they gained at HackerYou. Our part-time aren’t going anywhere. (In fact, we’re currently accepting applications to our next part-time Web Development course which starts this fall and will be led once again by Wes Bos.)

But we’re really excited to offer a full-time program for the first time. Mainly because we’ve seen what HackerYou graduates are able to do after participating in one our part-time programs – and in addition to the course, most of them are juggling full-time jobs and, in some cases, families!

Nine weeks dedicated to building your skills as a software developer, working on projects and collaborating with people just like you. It’s exactly what I’d love to do this summer. Which is why I’ll be moving to Ottawa to run – and participate in – the program. And boy, am I excited about it.

If you have any questions about the program this summer, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can email me at heather [at] hackeryou.com, or tweet at me – I’m @heatherpayne.

–

Thanks to Tobi, Daniel, Serena, Edward, Cheryl and Nicole and the HackerYou team for their respective contributions to making HackerYou Summer Academy happen.

The post The five reasons we’re most excited about HackerYou Summer Academy 2013 appeared first on HackerYou.

But don’t take it from us – here’s what workshop participant Chrystina Soltys had to say about the workshop:  

“The Sole Proprietor workshop with Wes Bos was single-handedly the most useful thing I have ever attended. I kept stalling my plans to start up my own company simply because I was intimidated by the bureaucracy – within three hours, my next steps were clear, tax fears and expense curiosities abated – and I’ve since moved forward successfully in getting my business started in a sensical and confident fashion. Not to mention the list of tips and tools at the end was pretty much like winning the lifehacking lottery!”

Here’s the post:

Everything I wish I knew running a sole proprietorship business

2013 marks the beginning of a new fiscal year for many businesses so I thought I would share a few things I have picked up over the past few years. I’ve run my web consulting business as a proprietorship the past three years and have picked up quite a few nuggets of useful information along the way. These things seem simple and almost laughable now, but as a greenhorn I wish I had known these before I started.

These tips are best if you are thinking about running a sole proprietorship (a business that is owned and run by a single person) in Canada but are helpful for other outside of the country.

Hire a good Accountant

I’m putting this one first because its by far the most important thing you should do when starting a business. My first year I paid someone $50 to do my taxes and I really got what I paid for. I had my taxes reassessed three times and had to pay the government more each time. The second year around I paid around $700 for the fantastic services of Waterford Tax & Advisory who did an amazing job straightening everything out and giving me some fantastic advice which saved me tons in the long run. A good accountant will always be around to answer questions and give you advice. You can’t afford to use a cheap accountant, trust me.

Ditch excel, use Freshbooks

This is a no-brainer for taking care of estimates, expenses and invoicing clients. At $33 a month, this is one of the more expensive services I subscribe to, but it is worth every penny. At the end of the year I’m able to export a few reports and send them off to my accountant – no dealing with spreadsheets. My clients love Freshbooks too – I often get compliments on both how easy it is to manage invoices and how professional my invoices look like.

Understand taxes – Personal and HST

Starting a business, you are probably coming from  a job where all your taxes are taken care of and at the end of the year, you get a nice little return from the government. Not so when you are on your own, take the time to educate yourself on what sort of taxes you need to pay in your area.

Personal Income Taxes: Running a sole proprietorship in Canada means you get taxed at the same rates as everyone else who isn’t self-employed. There are both provincial and federal tax rates that vary depending on how much income you bring in. You can run your numbers for both at the CRA website.

HST: I run my business in Ontario, and I need to charge all my clients who live in Ontario 13% HST – your province or state will have something similar setup. If you are making more than $30,000 a year  you will need to register for a HST number and start collecting.

So, the biggest lesson learned here is you need to pay a ton of taxes. As soon as you get a cheque, you should cut out anywhere from 35-50% (13% HST, 22-37% income tax)  - depending on how high your taxable income is – and placing it in another account to pay the tax man at the end of the year.

Keep every receipt and expense everything

The best thing you can do to reduce how hard you get hit by taxes is to expense every single dollar you pay to run your business. Again, this may seem like easy stuff to some, but its worth noting how this stuff works.

You only get taxed on net income, not gross income. So, if you get paid $1,000 for a project, but spent $200 on hosting for it, you will only be taxed on $800.

So, think of every little thing you use to run your business. Buying a new laptop, conference tickets + flights, printer ink, online subscriptions, software licenses… It all adds up quickly and can really help you reduce your taxable income.

As a business, you also don’t have to pay HST. So any receipt you have that includes 13% HST, you will get that back from the government when you pay your taxes.

Max out your RRSP

This is a good tip for anyone around tax time. Up until the end of February, you can contribute to the previous years RRSP. Anything you contribute to your RRSP is not taxed, so you can treat it as a huge expense. The amount you con contribute depends on your previous years income, but it could be as much as around $20,000. In Canada, this money is meant to only be taken out at retirement, but there is a special clause that lets you cash it out, without penalty, when you buy your first house.

Health Insurance is cheap

My wife recently quit her job to work independently beside me. While we are super happy with that decision, we lost the perk of health benefits. In Canada, residents are covered for the big stuff like surgeries and doctors appointments, but not things like medicine, dental work and eyeglasses. Insurance plans are surprisingly affordable, starting at $60 for basic coverage. Kait and I went for pretty good dental, eye and prescription coverage and it was around $160/month.

One other thing, we shopped around on the net for insurance and we didn’t find any good rates, only after getting in touch with a broker did we find out its much cheaper to have a human do it for you.

Incorporate to save $$

Coming full circle to having a good accountant, mine suggested that once you start earning decent income or are working in an arrangement like Kait and I are, it would make sense to ditch the sole proprietorship and incorporate as a business. Its more expensive to incorporate a business (~$500 vs $60) and its a more work to get up and running, but its well worth the tax savings in long run. I’m only beginning to explore this world but I’ll be sure to follow up with a post after a few months.

That’s it

TL;DR : Hire a good accountant and explore every possible way that you can reduce your taxable income. Starting to run your own business can be confusing so hopefully these tips can help you.

The post Everything I wish I knew running a sole proprietorship business appeared first on HackerYou.

Some things I learned at HackerYou:

1. Going to class can be fun – no, really!
2. There’s more to a website than text
3. HTML 5 is ugly, but CSS3 will make anything sexy
4. Having mentors helps
5. Anyone can make an awesome website

In December, I graduated from HackerYou’s fall course in HTML 5, CSS3 and responsive design. Having had no previous knowledge of HTML or CSS, coding a beautiful responsive website seemed like an impossible task. Thankfully, the team behind HackerYou makes sure you don’t feel alone or lost in a spiral of HTML tags. Taking HackerYou’s web development and responsive design course was an amazing experience. The class is small, the people are great and the material is really advanced but still easy to follow. The skills we learn and the stuff we build is complex enough to wow your average person and even some veterans of the trade. Wes Bos, who leads the 12-week program, has created material that is easy to follow and up-to-date with the latest trends. He also gives us helpful insight and hints along the way while also pushing us to achieve more on our own. The balance of teaching and practical assignments gave us the right skill set to create really cool websites and taught us useful tricks of the trade.

HackerYou students also have the chance to attend all of HackerYou’s excellent workshops (for free!) as an added benefit of joining one of HackerYou’s three-month courses. During the three-month course, I attended quite a few unique and high quality workshops led by extremely talented people. Workshops have ranged from startup marketing with April Dunford of Rocketscope to learning UI/UX design with Ricardo Vasquez of 500px. There are usually multiple workshops scheduled per week!

Since “graduating” from HackerYou, I’ve started noticing aspects of websites that I would have previously be oblivious to. Mentally, I automatically start chopping websites into different sections like the body, wrapper, sidebar, header, footer and can also pick out different elements of CSS that would achieve certain design attributes. The course has changed my perspective in terms of the work that goes into building beautiful websites.

Taking this course was a great decision – there aren’t many places where you get to meet such amazing people and learn these invaluable skills in a hands-on way. I can now confidently create beautiful responsive websites. Heather and the team behind HackerYou have really put together an excellent course with a phenomenal instructor and mentors. I’d like to sincerely thank the team for bringing this course to life, it was exactly what I was looking for and more.

The post From a Student: My Experience at HackerYou appeared first on 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.

The post Hey there, designers: You’re the perfect fit for HackerYou appeared first on HackerYou.

But these are just a few of the things that make HackerYou great. To be able to bring together a group of awesome, talented, forward-thinking people twice a week for three months so that they can build and hone an entirely new skill set – one that is going to come in handy for the rest of their professional lives – is a treat. But that’s what’s in it for me. What’s in it for you?

What do you really get when you enroll in HackerYou?

Allow me to elaborate, just in case this post has the potential to help you make the decision to apply to HackerYou before our next early bird deadline. Here’s what you’re in for if you decide to join us for a course:

1. 72 hours of in-class time (almost entirely dedicated to building stuff)

Whether you plan to do something entrepreneurial one day, want to stop paying other people to manage your personal or small business website, wish you could communicate more effectively with technical folks, or are looking to up your value as an employee…you should learn to code. And at HackerYou, that’s exactly what you’ll do. Each course is 72 hours long (price-wise, it’s just under $39 an hour) and you’ll spend almost all of that time actually writing code.

No matter what people say, making a time commitment (and a financial commitment) to learning a new skill can make a world of a difference. On your own, let’s say you can find an hour a week to dedicate to learning to code. At that rate, it will take you a year and five months to accomplish what will take you just three months to do at HackerYou. Plus, of course, at HackerYou, you’re guided by experts…but, more on that below.

2. A 10:1 ratio of students to instructors

Through our work with Ladies Learning Code, we’ve discovered that a small student-to-instructor ratio is the key to a great technical learning experience. At HackerYou, there isa 10:1 student-to-instructor ratio (or better!) at every class. Since classes are dedicated to writing code, it’s important that there are people there to help you when you get stuck. Or, for more advanced students, the mentors are there to challenge you by suggesting ways that you can deepen your learning by adding more complex functionality to your site. But what happens if you have a question outside of class? Well…

3. Seven-days-a-week access to the HackerYou community

Have a question outside of class? Never fear – as a HackerYou student, you’ll have seven-days-a-week access to the HackerYou forum. Using Lore‘s beautiful and elegant course management software, this forum is a place for you to interact with HackerYou instructors and mentors, myself and my team, and the other HackerYou students. As needed, we’ll add other experts to the site so that it can be a truly valuable resource for HackerYou students. And it doesn’t stop there – we’ll be creating a HackerYou Alumnni community as well, which you’ll become part of. It will become more and more valuable over time.

4. Unlimited HackerYou Workshops

When you sign up for a HackerYou course, your learning doesn’t just stop there. For the duration of your course, you have access to all of the workshops offered by HackerYou for free. We launch new workshops every week – for a list of workshops that are currently live, visit http://hackeryou.com/workshops.

5. An Introduction to the Best of Toronto’s Tech & Startup Community

Love the idea of going to more of Toronto’s tech and startup events, but not sure which ones are best? Or does showing up alone make you nervous? HackerYou students won’t have that problem, because we’ll curate the best events in the city, and head out to them as a group (optionally, of course). And if you want to learn something, but can’t find an event that will give you what you need? Let us know, and we’ll organize it, either just for HackerYou students, or for the broader community. It’s all part of our commitment to making HackerYou an amazing in-person learning experience, and something truly unique. But what if you need to meet someone really specific…

6. Trying to build a network? We’ll help with that.

Thanks again to Ladies Learning Code, we have a huge network of Toronto’s brightest entrepreneurs, developers, designers, illustrators, and more. Looking for a designer to join you for a passion project? Or need to pick the brains of successful entrepreneurs as you begin to plan your transition from corporate to startup life? We know people. If you’re looking for an introduction to someone really specific, we might be able to help with that, too. Try us.

7. Job Shadowing, If You Want It

As I’ve been chatting with the people who have applied to HackerYou (I meet everyone who applies for coffee), I’ve been asking them what would make their HackerYou course over-the-top awesome for them. A few people have mentioned job shadowing as something they’d be really interested in. So, we’re adding it to the program. If you want to job shadow someone (or someone in a certain job or company), let us know and we’ll set it up.

And, if you have other ideas for what would make HackerYou an even better learning experience, let us know! We’re up for the challenge.

8. HackerYou Demo Day

HackerYou participants have the opportunity to participate in a Demo Day at the end of the course (optionally, of course). This is our chance to show the people who say that you can’t learn to code in three months that they’re wrong. It’s a celebration, but it’s also about inspiring people who think that learning to code isn’t for them. Learning to code is for everyone, whether you want to become a professional or not.

9. A Guaranteed Internship

Most people who come to HackerYou aren’t looking for a job – they already have one, and they want to learn to code in order to enhance their chosen career. There are always a few people in each course, though, that are looking to use the skills they learn at HackerYou to land a new job. We’ll help them find one, but if they’re not quite ready, we’re happy to offer a guaranteed internship with HackerYou to students who graduate from the program. We tailor the internship to the role they’re seeking, but for example, here are two projects created by HackerYou interns: http://hackeryou.com/students and http://ladieslearningcode.com/map.

It’s all of that, and more. 

If you’re ready to lean to code, and looking for the most comprehensive in-person learning experience around, you’re exactly who we’re looking for. Apply now.

The post What You Get When You Enroll in HackerYou appeared first on HackerYou.

This is the second post in a three-part series where we will document our progress as we design and develop a responsive web page. If you haven’t done so yet, feel free to check out our first post here.

This week we tackled the tablet-sized screen design for our responsive web page. Rather than creating a minified version of the desktop site  we designed a tablet -specific site. Even though this screen size is considerably smaller than the desktop counterpart the tablet-size bares it’s own unique set of challenges and considerations when developing and designing for it.

Concept & Design:

As with any responsive tablet page there are several  design considerations one needs to take into account.  The layout needs to be simpler,  buttons must be large enough to “tap” rather than click and there are no “hover” states. Though the look of the tablet site would have to be simplified, we wanted to retain an interactive element. We felt the best way to achieve this was to carry over our existing “plus” signs and use them as buttons. By tapping these buttons users could expand and close our students’ testimonials. Not only were we able to retain a level of interaction but by using our existing assets we could relate our tablet design to our desktop design. Here are some of our progress shots:

Sketch of our tablet design concept.

Setting up our margins.

Adding names and assets.

Screenshot showing the active state of our mobile layout

Development:

Development definitely gave us a run for our money this week. To allow for our buttons to function the way we envisioned we employed the use of jQuery. We are both just beginning to learn jQuery. Needless to say our pal, Google was as invaluable as ever.

Another big challenge we faced concerned the positioning of our “plus” buttons.  We used a CSS sprite sheet to create the rotating effect of our buttons. (To learn more about  CSS Sprites click here.) Sprites can be a touchy. This week was no exception. As we mentioned we ran into a lot of issues when it came to positioning the sprites individually  as well as  relatively to other elements on the page.

Our solution: to break up our tablet views into slightly bigger and slightly smaller tablet screen sizes, to ensure that the symbols would remain in their correct location.Progress clip showing our work so far.

Clip showing the dropdown menu in action, still need to tweak the margin and padding!

Be sure to check out the blog next week for the third and final part our series, where we will be covering our design/development process for mobile screens.

- Steph and Emily

The post Processing: HackerYou Interns Build a Site from the Ground Up, Part 2 appeared first on HackerYou.

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.

The post Here’s why you’re having trouble recruiting a technical co-founder appeared first on HackerYou.

This is the first post in a three-part series where we will document our progress as we design and develop a responsive web page. We wanted to chronicle our work from the point of conception to its launch. The page itself will be one part infographic, one part brochure and it will be entirely responsive (a dynamic web page that resizes depending upon the size of the screen it is being viewed on).

Each week, we’ll post shots, thoughts and reflections about our progress. We hope this will help inspire and enlighten others curious about web technology, especially potential HackerYou students (because the HackerYou Web Development course with Wes Bos will be back in March).

This week we focused on the design and development of the first portion of the site, the desktop screen. We collected screenshots and documented some of the challenges and successes we’ve had while creating this project so far.

The Concept & The Design:

The first step in this project was to come up with the idea. In addition to showing potential students what HackerYou is like, we also felt it was important to show what we learned from our Intro to the Web Development course, giving potential students an idea of what they will learn once they’ve completed the course. After some discussion we landed on our concept. We would use a candid class photo from our Web Development class with interactive speech bubbles incorporating testimonials from HackerYou alumni. This concept would effectively capture the lively, hands-on vibe of HackerYou and would also be an interesting way to demonstrate the skills we learned. Once we had our concept pinned down we turned to Photoshop to create a fully realized mockup. Here are some of the progress shots:

We started with some quick sketches of the layout as well as the assets we would be using.

We used a grid and ruler lines to keep everything aligned, giving the plus signs a scattered but neat look.

Development:

Once we completed our work with Photoshop we got started with the development side of things. We knew that the speech bubble would be the most difficult part, so we decided to tackle it first. Through our existing knowledge of CSS3 and with help from our pal, Google, we were able to effectively execute our intended concept.

Progress clip showing our use of CSS3 animation work, so far.

Be sure to check out the blog next week for the second part our series, where we will be covering our design/development process for tablet-sized screens.

- Steph and Emily

The post Processing: HackerYou Interns Build a Site from the Ground Up, Part 1 appeared first on HackerYou.

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.

The post Young people are screwed…here’s how to survive appeared first on HackerYou.