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Comment by prophetjohn | Hacker News Reader

> I left Ladies Learning Code having accomplished my goal. I built a WordPress.org

What does this actually mean? The sentence itself seems to indicate that the class was focused around learning to program by building a WordPress clone. My suspicion based on reading the whole article is that she took a class showing her how to use WordPress to create a blog. If she doesn't know the distinction, I'm skeptical that she really learned to program in any meaningful way.

I do think it's great that people who are mostly technically illiterate are making efforts to change that, though.

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Wordpress dot com is a blog hosting service based on wordpress. Perhaps she meant they were setting up a web server to run multiple blogs with multiple users, using wordpress as as a platform (and specifically the MultiSite feature https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network ).

I can see how this would be a useful endeavor. In any case, yes, her language may be imprecise here but remember to be forgiving to people who are just learning!!! You are skeptical of her skills; I am skeptical of the notion that you have enough information to evaluate her skills or the class. :)

No, you're right; I don't really have enough information to evaluate her skills, mainly because she didn't talk about what she learned. So, the language she used to describe technical things is the only way I could try to evaluate her technical knowledge.

And upon further review, it seems pretty likely that the class she took is this one: http://ladieslearningcodejan14.eventbrite.com/

Wow, an 8 hour $40 course with a 4:1 student to instructor ratio. With even just a little bit of demand no wonder it sells out so quickly.

Seems like they have an open call to devs to take the sessions, presumably with a cut for each dev that does it and where they do it. So the quality of the information would ddepend on the dev that bothered to nominate themselves.

Unfortunately this could mean that the quality of the cource is wholy dependant on the dev assigned to you're 4:1 session.

I wonder what the screening process is. But undoubtedly a good business model for raising quick capital, with a high pivot rate, as & when it supports demand.

As a developer for BlogHer, a women's media company with a big network of independent women bloggers, I hear lots of people who don't know the correct terminology say things like this. When they say "a WordPress.org" they mean "a self-hosted WordPress site".

I know what she meant, just like I know what my mom means when she points to her computer tower and calls it a CPU or calls her browser a search engine. I was just trying to make the point that her vocabulary didn't reflect a person who was particularly competent at programming. I later realized that she likely only learned enough HTML and CSS to customize a WordPress page, which just means that I assumed wrong about what the "Learning Code" portion of the program name implied.

It is learning code.

Think back to the first eight hours of coding of your entire life. It was probably copy-pasting stuff you didn't really understand from a magazine or a web page and watching some colors flash or text scrolling down.

It is not a lot, but it is a start. 8 down, 9992 to go to mastery.

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