HN user
Hoping one day to be a serial cereal entrepreneur.
This quote is fantastic:
In 1992, Roy Hall, a 46-year-old minister, bought a royal blue Hickey-Freeman jacket at Unclaimed Baggage. When he took it home, he noticed the name “Whitey Ford” — a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees — written inside of it. Informed of the find, Ford asked for his jacket back; Hall decided to keep it.
Who cares if it’s true; the minister is like, “return a lost article to its rightful owner? Nah.”
Even though a direct competitor with DBC I just wanted to say: solid team and leadership; we respect everyone there, especially in pioneering the market in the early years.
It was in DBC's NYC campus that I did my first LGBT advocacy event. Still remember the passion of the students and instructors two years later.
I know I speak for everyone here when I say I’m sorry to see a leader and organization leave the community.
- Team Thinkful darrell@thinkful.com
Anyplace and bite-sized learning, even before personalizing it to a commute or using other data, seems totally green field. Most corporate training is just videos. Pretty exciting.
Hi Mohamed – what bootcamp are you joining?
Chris's point seems basically undisputable: tons of engineering talent but not enough vision to gain escape velocity from the massive gravitational pull of Google's wide-ranging needs across all its products.
Remember before you could be signed in with multiple accounts across all google services? Those were the (sucky) days.
I wish G+ were either exclusively focused on utilities (personalized search across services, unified privacy permissions, etc) OR useful/fun social features that could be developed outside the borg's massive scale expectations. Trying to do both seems impossible.
3 months from beginner to job ready ready is, basically, bullshit. There are people who do it, but they're the exception. The jobs they're getting typically rely on their using other skill sets on day one so they can continue learning software engineering for months in order to gain a useful level of proficiency.
This doesn't make the "3 month" claim worthless, but it does make it hard to fit into a sound bite.
I should know: I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Thinkful, Codecademy's other online partner in ReskillUSA.
Our company has hired many of our own students and helped hundreds of others successfully make the transition to truly job-ready engineer.
I've also spent the last decade as a professional software engineer, and another five years before that writing software. I'm 33 years old. After coding for half my life I feel I know less than half the craft.
Why do you think he chose to come out now?
Hm. On the homepage the price is listed as part of the main description of the course. You're not the first to make this point – there's definitely something to it. We'll have to rethink appropriately. Surprises like this in funnels are not a winning strategy.
Swift was designed for beginners and in our experience it delivers. We (http://www.thinkful.com/) recommend Swift for beginners and the students in our Swift classes the last few months agree!
Thinkful based in NYC: We're looking for software engineers interested in helping us build the best online education platform, in AngularJS + Python / Flask.
For engineering, check out the full job listing here: https://jobs.lever.co/thinkful/8a737595-fb6a-407d-9723-04dc6...
We're also hiring a leader in design and UX: https://jobs.lever.co/thinkful/e1dd4a11-0f50-4607-9b9e-8e7da...
Thinkful has the industry's best experts across the US who mentor students 1:1 as they go through our curriculum. We've been growing revenue 25% each month since founding at the beginning of 2013.
Our team today is 18 (9 engineers) and growing to 35 in 2014. We took one round of seed funding from Peter Thiel, RRE, Quotidian Ventures in early 2013.
Contact me directly to talk: darrell@thinkful.com
For all our other positions check out: https://jobs.lever.co/thinkful
Our mentors & curriculum developers went bananas when they heard about Swift – so we announced the first course teaching Swift: https://www.thinkful.com/a/dlp/learn-blue/base/IOS-002
Awesome site, and want to support any way we can. Great context around content sources both free and paid are really promising.
Let me know if we can be at all of help: darrell [at] thinkful.com
Yeah – it's an easier way to do donations, but the tax implications and fees are the same as always. It even comes out of your paycheck pre-tax... making your tax end simpler as well.
This sounds like a temporary issue in your career, or, put another way, a circumstance of that particular job. In another year or two (or in another opp that values slightly different things) the full stack marketer will be incredibly valuable again.
Note the value may be for new reasons: Simply understanding all angles of a business is incredibly valuable, and often lacking. It's arguably the one skill one needs more than anything to become a member of senior leadership at most well-functioning companies.
The Blogger example doesn't seem fair: Any app can overload the user with too many animations or other distractions.
At Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) we're building our student / education app in Angular, and are moving all browser-side code to Angular as well – both public and private.
In a lot of our splash or SEO-enabled content we're not making use of all of angular's features, but the upside of using it is that we have a single, unified codebase in which we can share libraries, team knowledge and design patterns. Simply put: Using Angular everywhere allows us to keep DRY. Testing the front-end using purely Angular is yet another core asset at Thinkful.
One framework for writing code and testing is much better than a hybrid of server-side rendering and Angular.
Our biggest challenge was SEO, but this was reasonably easily solved with using BromBone (http://www.brombone.com/).
There are reasons to stick with non-angular or JS frameworks, so it's not always a slam-dunk. For example, if Thinkful had millions of SEO pages that we needed to load as fast as humanly possible Angular would be a bit much... But that's not what we're optimizing for: We're building a phenomenal user-experience that we can support long-term, is well tested, can have a lot of developers use, and can have non-developers do their job inside our codebase (everyone at Thinkful codes).
For all this and more Angular has proven a great choice for both logged-in AND public sites.
We just went through the entire 2013 performance for female and male students here at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/).
The results are very revealing for this debate: Once enrolled in our courses, women perform exactly as well as men in every dimension. However, enrollment among women is significantly behind their male peers, but sadly on par with what other coding schools are seeing.
Here's the data: http://blog.thinkful.com/post/72670499078/gender-differences...
It's much more common than when you were 22. Career changes, diff tracks through school, all sorts of reasons why people want to do internships into late 20s and thirties since the recent recession.
Companies are still desperate for top talent, and for specialized skills at growing firms (tech) that's especially true. We have interns starting with us in the summer at http://www.thinkful.com/ (edtech) and two of them are in or finishing masters' in CS from Columbia.
As long as you're not being taken advantage of by a cheap employer I think internships are a great low risk way to try a job and career.
Thinkful based in NYC: We're looking for software engineers interested in helping us build an education platform in AngularJS + Python / Flask.
Thinkful is the best way to learn online part-time. We've been growing revenue 25% each month since founding at the beginning of 2013.
Our team today is 12 (6 engineers) and growing to 14-16 in January. We took one round of seed funding from Peter Thiel, RRE, Quotidian Ventures in early 2013.
Contact me directly to talk: darrell@thinkful.com
We're also hiring for several non-engineering positions: http://www.thinkful.com/about
For sure there are other things to worry about... but it's not a label, it's a first impression.
We didn't originally spend a lot of time thinking about our jobs pages at http://www.thinkful.com/ until candidates started asking about them. Then we realized the number of people who were turned off from talking to us because we explained the company so poorly.
There's still a lot of work to do, but that's always the case!
This maps extraordinarily closely with what we've seen at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) with both our hiring as a team and with the students we've helped get hired.
Our biggest breakthrough actually came last month when we started simply hiring our students. Three of our last five hires have come from people taking one of our classes.
It's a phenomenal way to get the voice of the user into our user experience, and each has proven a great cultural fit.
We're not sure it'll work for every position, but perhaps when Thinkful starts offering CTO-classes!
This is great! I love tools that help you understand tough concepts in a simple, no setup way. We'll definitely include this in our curricula at http://www.thinkful.com/
Would love to talk about other ways to work together as well – drop me a line: darrell@thinkful.com
I disagree – customer support doesn't start with the person on the phone with the customer, it ends there. When a company designs a process where the person on the phone isn't empowered to effect change that person is guaranteed to be useless.
That this was happening to Google, and that it occurred exactly when we tried to _pay them money_ definitely makes the situation hilarious.
The same thing happened to us as http://www.thinkful.com/, only it took 18 hours to come back! Customer support was hilariously useless as well: "Yes, happens to everyone." "No, there's nothing we can do about it."
For us, accounts that were forwarding mail someplace else continued to work, but anyone that had to log into Thinkful's gmail account didn't.
The best part of this post is definitely "candi_awesome1988@yahoo.co.uk" from "BUT MY COUSIN’S NEIGHBOUR SAID…"
Oh, that's really awesome.
Awesome book. I think we used this book in my CS days, but would have to check my notes.
Well timed post as well: We're adding more on programming fundamentals to our course at http://www.thinkful.com/
This is a great list! To teach front-end web development at http://www.thinkful.com/ we also sometimes use http://prework.flatironschool.com/
Love the "RSS activity feeds" feature the OP mentions toward the bottom of this post.
The best book on hiring, no doubt, is Who: http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/0345504194
We used it to build our hiring process for http://www.thinkful.com/ and it consistently proves valuable.
We also use it to help our students prepare for job interviews.
I disagree. I found the tutorial for beginners really well done and when followed by the conceptual model it was solid.
We're thinking of integrating them into our course at http://www.thinkful.com/ – though we provide more structure than just the docs, they're pretty solid on their own.
Those resources are - http://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial/step_00 - http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/concepts