How Mendicant University Works | Hacker News Reader

How Mendicant University Works

blog.rubybestpractices.com

35 pointssandal14 comments

I can't believe there's trolling going on here. RbMU is a free service run for the community that helps intermediate programmers make the difficult next step, and gets them contributing to open source. We're so lucky to have them in the Ruby community!

I did five or six Ruby quizzes (rubyquiz.com) in my spare time with a mentor (unaffiliated with RbMU, just a friendly guy who agreed to spend a couple of hours on his Sundays coding with me over TeamViewer), read a few Ruby books and blogs, and was accepted into core skills for January. Getting past beginner isn't necessarily easy, but there is a much more well-defined path for learning than there is for learning as an intermediate, where questions you have may not always have answers in books and guided project work seems to be the best way forward.

Since I have not done the course yet I cannot speak for the quality, but I have only heard good things. At the least, RbMU has been a great target for me to aim for while leveling up as a beginner, and a source for practice problems. If practicingruby.com is any indication of the quality, I think I'll be in good hands.

I tried the entrance exam puzzles but they are just too hard! how can I get good enough to solve these puzzles and get in? I really feel I need some kind of mentor and I could benefit from a program like this.

In addition to our core course, we also have an awesome mentoring program run by our alumni. You can get details about that here:

https://github.com/rmu/mentoring

Keep trying the puzzles. If you are really stuck you can always look around GitHub for solutions written by other people, or jump in #rmu on freenode and ask for help. Of course you don't want to look at other people's solutions if you are applying for the core course, but asking for help with problem definitions is totally fine.

We had originally hoped that the introductory Ruby course at P2PU would serve as an entry point leading up to the Mendicant University core skills session. Unfortunately that class hasn't quite come together and we don't have an immediate alternative path that is both free and of sufficiently high quality to recommend.

What you can definitely do (as Jordan mentioned) is get some help from our mentoring program. You'll be able to study at your own pace that way, but get some guidance as needed along the way: https://github.com/rmu/mentoring/wiki/Instructions-for-stude...

Is enrollment free?

Yes, all of our courses are completely free as in beer and as in freedom. We run everything on a full open source stack and release all our exercises.

Cool. I wish you guys would make that more prominent. A lot of other "online schools," both programming and non-programming, will charge for BS courses, and I'm usually very skeptical of online offerings unless I know the source (MIT OCW, Stanford, Open Yale, etc).

Anyways, I will definitely apply then. This looks sweet!

You're absolutely right. On top of that, many schools that are "free" are typically just trying to sell you something else. That's not the case with Mendicant University.

Right now our public facing website has very little useful information because we've grown by word of mouth and one-on-one interactions up until this point, and still manage to fill our courses up without a problem. However, in the long term we do need to do a better job of making it easier for folks to know what we're all about without having to be a friend of a friend of mine.

I am also starting a school for ruby programmers but without the requirement of them to be an expert to get in.

We are aiming at intermediate developers who are proficient in Ruby. While I have a fair bit of Ruby expertise, I still consider myself an intermediate software developer at best, because there is so much to learn!

It's true that Mendicant University doesn't do much right now to serve the beginner to advanced beginner crowd. We had hoped that some combination of Hackety Hack and P2PU would have done that, but it just hasn't happened. Our resources are limited and so the strategy we are taking is to teach students who have some degree of Ruby experience how to get stronger, with the hope that they will turn around and help out others. Many have done so already, but in small scale efforts.

We do have a beginner's course in the works, but it may be another six months to a year before we're ready to try it out. If you are seriously thinking of starting a school for Ruby programmers which is completely free but aimed more towards beginners, please do get in touch with us. We'd love it if someone else could focus on that, because it's a real community need.

VaporEdu?

Not sure why you say Vapor they've been conducting classes for a while, and are currently accepting new students.

Nope. We are very much a real school with real people doing really cool things. I compiled a list of articles and videos about the school a few months ago which you might find interesting:

http://jordanbyron.com/rbmu.html

They are a bit out of date, but the videos are still a lot of fun for me to watch. Enjoy :)

No, not vapor at all:

* http://university.rubymendicant.com/resources/learning_mater...

* http://university.rubymendicant.com/resources/student_projec...

* http://university.rubymendicant.com/resources/core_projects....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com