Codestarter is winding down | Hacker News Reader

Codestarter is winding down

blog.codestarter.org

64 pointsshurcooL10 comments

It is unfortunate they are shutting down, but if they were only using donations as a means of funding it seems inevitable.

Maybe a dual mission/stage program would have been better.

Use initial donations to buy laptops, rent space and pay for speakers to have a coding bootcamp type program for unemployed or disadvantaged people. If you wanted the primary focus to be on school age kids you could consider highschool juniors/seniors that were not planning to go to college.

Prepare them for a job as an entry level coder or designer. When they get a job hopefully they will donate back to the program and/or provide mentorship for the new sections.

If establish the older section (age 16+) first, you could have additional funding opportunities by having the students host, "How to use {software/product}" classes. Ask for donations or a recommended fee for those that could afford it. Also make it available for free to help other disadvanted job seekers learn the fundamentals of Windows, Office, Internet searching, etc.

Once you had some older established alumni or employees you could transition to the younger demographic by hosting coding classes and summer camps for a fee. Then use the revenue to sponsor under privileged kids to attend it as well.

The goal would be to have the kids attending for free eventually transition to junior counselers or teachers for the camps and classes.

It would take a few years, and could still fail, but would have a better chance of surviving with a revenue model that didn't focus solely on outside donations.

I think they could have done a lot of good work by giving lots of kids chrome books and setting them up with dirt simple EC2 vms + awesome remote editing software. That way you get to keep the chrome book intact with default settings, run everything through the browser (which means you can skip the chrome book for kids who have computer access) and give them real computing power + the benefits of remote development (frequent backups, standardized auto-updating environments, etc)

Hmm, you make a really good point. Then the system requirements become super low, at the cost of requiring stable / reliable / reasonable internet connectivity.. seems inevitable longer term but not sure about the kids and schools that were targeted.

Having a development environment and editor in the browser is definitely the way to go for students learning to code. Updating a browser is significantly easier and cheaper than purchasing a new machine. Kids learning to code shouldn't have to worry about specs, software installation, and OS configuration.

Nitrous, Cloud9, Koding etc... all have free tiers. We're working on Nitrous and definitely will continue to support students as best we can. We recently launched a native chrome application, and honestly with our chrome application a $200 chromebook can be a pretty amazing development machine, even for professional developers.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitrous/efdcneeepl...

I am the founder of Codeanywhere, and I totally agree with ajhit406.

This is why we active support non profits like Coderdojo and Codestarter (while it was active).

As a note, 'remote editing' need not imply a browser-based solution: emacs with TRAMP can edit remote files as though they are local, and sshfs can do much the same thing. NFS could also work, of course, although I don't know what it's performance is across the Internet.

Looks like they depended on these 199 dollar chromebooks

http://blog.codestarter.org/how-we-turn-199-chromebooks-into...

Was this a business, or a charity? I am not really following here..

Charity, they are a 501(c)(3).

Donations converted to Laptops. No money making! "For every $250 donated, we'll ship a laptop to a kid who is waiting to enroll in a programming class."

A similar idea is to buy older used laptops (like the HP 2530p/2540p series - dirt cheap, well built machines) in bulk, refurbish and donate them to schools. There's quite a few people who do this in developing countries...

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