While I admire the work of Avi and the guys at the Flatiron School greatly, I disagree with some of their basic principles. In particular, they perpetuate this myth that only some people are cut out to be developers by working very hard to qualify people in advance of accepting them. This makes them a lot like an intensive computer science program. By making sure you only have people who are likely to be able to sit for months learning the very basics of syntax before ever moving on to the applicable stuff, you're alienating so many people who could potentially be building something very valuable just because they didn't happen to have an intrinsic interest in something like where a comma goes (not that that's not important, there's just no reason we have to teach it FIRST instead of second, or third, etc.).
I'm making a bet here (and all startups are bets after all) that there are some people who can become good developers but learn differently from everyone else. Let's please at least try to diversify the way we teach things, at least in the interest of testing a hypothesis, instead of just accepting the standard dogma?
So the idea is this: get people genuinely interested in code by showing them what it can do. Isn't that how great teachers teach at the end of the day? Inspire in them a yearning to learn more.
Plus I think it's a real shame that people learning coding totally out of context from its application. People finish Codecademy not understanding how the hell anything they learned actually fits into a web application.
My goal is to give people a broad understanding of the various parts of a web application: the view, the model, the controller, routing, deployment, version control, gems, StackOverflow, etc. How many other online resources are there than cover all that for beginners in one place? Not many.
I'm making a bet here (and all startups are bets after all) that there are some people who can become good developers but learn differently from everyone else. Let's please at least try to diversify the way we teach things, at least in the interest of testing a hypothesis, instead of just accepting the standard dogma?
So the idea is this: get people genuinely interested in code by showing them what it can do. Isn't that how great teachers teach at the end of the day? Inspire in them a yearning to learn more.
Plus I think it's a real shame that people learning coding totally out of context from its application. People finish Codecademy not understanding how the hell anything they learned actually fits into a web application.
My goal is to give people a broad understanding of the various parts of a web application: the view, the model, the controller, routing, deployment, version control, gems, StackOverflow, etc. How many other online resources are there than cover all that for beginners in one place? Not many.