I quit my job as a software engineer at Google early this year to teach people how to code. I started paying people $15/hr to learn so they can make ends meet while learning instead of working at Walmart.
I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).
Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.
2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.
Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.
Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.
We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.
While your post is getting lots of reads, you should set up a landing page to collect email addresses. That way, when you have your non-profit set up, you send an email out asking for donations.
This is absolutely awesome. Sounds like a really great way to make the world a better place.
Not everybody is using fb, I hope you'll finish your http://garagescript.org/ website soon because now most links don't seem to be working. When you provide more details I think you may find some people who are willing to donate. E.g. is non-profit registered under garagescript? I couldn't find it. Well at least make contact and linkedin links working now that you are going to get some exposure from HN frontpage.
Got a bit too much into details, but what I meant to say, really great initiative, kudos.
i admire what you're doing but I wonder why spend any significant amount of time on most if not all points on this list? if the goal is "couch -> working developer" then I don't think they're relevant to getting ramped up and working as a programmer/dec/swe who can deliver value. the black boxes you talk about might be better off taught in a lazy fashion so to speak.
a lot of these seem devopsy. I've definitely delved into a lot of these as an extracurricular activity over the years or have had to learn for work reasons (like being the only guy willing to take on the devops type work) but I'm not sure it belongs in a boot camp type curriculum.
You are right, we actually don't put much effort teaching these things, its pretty much lazy learning when it comes to devops. However, I make it a point to host and handle everything in-house so students see the whole picture of how the internet works. The alternative is to push to heroku or host code on github, which introduces black box.
What you're doing sounds great. I'm on the board of HackerDojo, our mission sounds pretty aligned to yours and you are not too far away - so get in touch, I'm sure we can figure out a way to support what you're doing! (will send pm also)
Responded, I think donating time is the best form of donation. Students want mentorship from industry veterans but its hard to find people willing to commit the time to mentor. Thank you for offering!
Making their own pools reminds me of PARC, and minimizing black boxes/assumptions must be very satisfying.
There's so many assumptions in mathematics, I've always assumed it must just take too much time/expertise to cover them properly. Engineering != math, but accomplishing that is revolutionary.
You know Wo/Man I think you should put up a page and ask for people to donate as sponsors. I think HN users alone, if we come together, could send 10,20,50,100 people through your program. I would be proud to know my few dollars helped in this way.
Yeah! Thats the plan for next year. It takes time to set up a donation platform as an NPO and we are working on it. In the meantime, I put an email signup (per baron816's suggestion) and will send out an email when donation tools are ready).
Hey, I tried doing something similar in my city. I found designing a useful curriculum a challenge. I would love to ask a few questions. Couldn't get hold of your email. My email is raghav.toshniwal at google's service.
Thank you, I'm on the same page. And you are correct that NPO takes longer and is a more complicated process, but we are diligently working to make it happen.
(Moral of story: don't announce genuinely amazing new initiatives without taking the time to get the donation links working first!)
Curious how/why something like PayPal/Stripe integration couldn't be done in a short amount of time. Not as a criticism, just "is this actually technically hard?" (or is it just a time issue?)
1. I was genuinely sharing what I did this year, was not hoping for any positive financial outcomes.
2. Integration with non-profits donations is not trivial. After registering as a non-profit, it takes some time for the list of registered non-profits to propagate through to donation tools (facebook, gofundme, etc). Sometimes, I have to fax in documents to prove legitimacy, and it takes a few days for that to process. I could easily create a gofundme for "help me do x" in my name instead of the non-profit's, but I didn't want to do that.
Check out givelively.org for (free) Stripe-based nonprofit fundraising and payment tools. I used to work there and they are doing a great job simplifying the process. I'm happy to put you in touch with the team if it's helpful.
I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).
Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.
2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.
Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.
Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.
We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.
https://www.facebook.com/garagescript/