Show HN: Boot.dev – Learn computer science, not the latest hotness | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Boot.dev – Learn computer science, not the latest hotness

boot.dev

38 pointswagslane6 comments

Hey HN! I'm Lane, the creator of Boot.dev.

A couple years ago I was working as an engineering manager, and my wife was working as an x-ray tech. Frankly, she was a bit jealous of the work-life balance I had, the pay, the work from home, etc. I started looking for a program she could take online to get into coding and was super disappointed.

It seemed like everywhere I looked, at least a few of the following problems were present:

- Bootcamps are expensive and risky - Video courses don't have you to writing enough code - Many curriculums weren't structured in linear paths - CS concepts were skipped over, dropping students straight into hot new frameworks - Old languages and technologies were being used, when more modern alternatives exist (Why would I want to learn Python 2??)

Anyhow, I started building boot.dev about 2 years ago, and just have been plugging away at it on the side of my full-time job. I'm excited to hear any feedback :)

Honestly, the title seems a bit misleading. This doesn't look like a computer science curriculum. It in fact looks like it's teaching me "the latest hotness" (JS, Python and Go). The description of the Go course alone points to that "Go is one of the most popular languages this year."

I would also argue that the CS track would be confusing for someone new... why would I want to learn the basics of JS and then drop-off and start Python, drop-off and start Go?

But the begging question here is... has your wife used this course? What did she think compared to other options? :)

Strongly concur. In my opinion, any "real" computer science course cares little about the cool hip language that uses but cares almost exclusively in the theory that makes Computer Science...well a science. I just don't see connection into what founder comment mentioned and what I found on the site.

A lot of boot camp devs have no idea how the computer works and just spew out (often terrible) code. Over time they do develop these skills but I think that’s what the creator is saying. Instead of jumping into creating modals with react or connecting to Postgres and adding some data with Go, I think it’s more important to understand data structures and some strategies around writing code to solve problems. Obviously day to day most react people won’t be implementing these, until they have to create a file explorer and need to show the file tree. Add a new file. Etc.

Nice, I just signed up and think I might stick with it to learn Golang, which I've been wanting to do for a while.

One small bug I noticed, in Brave, I was seeing "come back on a computer - mobile phone something..." and I never saw the assignments/quiz questions and eventually I refreshed or took Brave shields down or something and I finally saw that there was Insights and questions etc for each lesson, and a way to submit feedback. Oh, maybe I was messing with the drop downs and jumping back lessons etc? I dunno, but for the first 5 lessons I thought it was just information, this is for the Learn Go course, fwiw. I don't know how it finally realized I was on a browser on a computer but this bug might be getting others too and they won't be able to have the real experience. It is a bug somewhere.

Good work on this though, I will give it some more time and see about signing up (now that I got it working).

The curriculum on your project looks like any other web dev oriented bootcamp to me. Not that anything is wrong with that, it's just in my mind a CS oriented curriculum would be something like teachyourselfcs.

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