so, my startup used to be a Codecademy competitor but we allowed users to build full blown Rails applications in their browser. our customers ran into the same problems you described and we also felt like an online environment was cheating our users because a real developer needs to know how to use the terminal and set up an environment.
we decided that the automated, "interactive" approach just doesn't work -- the feedback systems are just not flexible or responsive enough. So now we do online bootcamps for WebDev, iOS, and Design where we mentor you and a group of peers virtually. You can check it out at http://bloc.io
It's expensive, but people who are serious enough about learning know that it's an investment in themselves and pays itself back 10x.
Thank you for your response, Roshan. Bloc.io sounds like what I'm ultimately going to need to do. I'd been considering just taking a course locally but had reservations about finding something that fit my schedule and was taught by someone I felt knew what they were talking about.
Do you honestly believe that you can teach a person with no programming knowledge Ruby/Rails in 8 weeks? Having strong HTML/CSS skills and basic JS/Ruby/Rails, I don't see this as a realistic goal, and could leave some people disappointed for the amount of money spent. Thoughts?
I'd really love to write up a blog about this, but I'll do my best to summarize my thoughts here:
It's a legitimate question. Empirically, it seems like it is possible since DevBootcamp in SF has been able to do it and 88% of their students were qualified enough to obtain jobs as Rails developers. I think that's a pretty fair metric to go by.
Our bootcamp is not as much of a time commitment as DevBootcamp, but I think more than half of the battle of learning a new domain is minimizing the space of "things you don't know you don't know". I think that's a much more reasonable goal, after which it's a lot easier to direct your own learning because you've gotten through the steepest parts of the learning curve.
For example, if you never had any concept of a database, it'd be really hard to learn more about them. Someone new to web development and programming probably has no concept of databases being separate from code. If they wanted to have "users" in their application, they probably wouldn't even know how to formulate a question to ask Google. Would they ask "how do I store users in an app?" No, because they probably don't have any concept of "storage" in an app. Or maybe they do but they pick the wrong word and ask "how do I save users in an app?". "save" and "store" are almost synonymous in a general context, but Google will give you drastically different results because they have different idiomatic meanings in a web development context. In any case, neither of those queries will get you what you want from Google (which is, to discover what a "database" is).
I guess my point is that the goal for us at Bloc isn't to cram your brain with enough knowledge for you to call yourself a Rails hacker -- it's to get you through the steep part of the learning curve and give you a large enough view of the landscape of web development for you to continue learning afterword.
Well good luck to y'all. I like the idea, and agree with the analogy. I guess it would just be an important point to make clear to the student they won't be a Rails ninja by the end of the course.
I'm currently at livngsocial doing front-end dev and you may have heard of the Hungry Academy program that they have going on right now. The students (some of which had no prior programming experience) are 4 months in now and it's pretty amazing what they can do.
Yes. It is definitely possible. Remember the 5 minutes blog that Rails used to have on their website?
The timeline can be something like these:
- 2 weeks: basic programming knowledge(just Ruby, not Rails)
- 2 weeks: basic website knowledge(html/css/js)
- 2 weeks: basic rails knowledge(modal/view/controller)
- 2 weeks(final): a final project to do whatever you want?
Most importantly, there is a huge difference between learning it yourself and learning it under the guidance of someone else who already knows a lot about teaching others programming.
we decided that the automated, "interactive" approach just doesn't work -- the feedback systems are just not flexible or responsive enough. So now we do online bootcamps for WebDev, iOS, and Design where we mentor you and a group of peers virtually. You can check it out at http://bloc.io
It's expensive, but people who are serious enough about learning know that it's an investment in themselves and pays itself back 10x.