antiffan

First Step Coding | Growth Marketing Manager | REMOTE | Full-time, Part-time

First Step Coding is hiring a growth marketing manager to join a small team of 3 to grow a profitable education business with product-market fit.

We occupy a unique niche in the coding bootcamp space. For most of our students, our classes are their first serious foray into coding. Since we focus exclusively on the introductory level, we have opportunities to partner with many other organizations in the space.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Primary ownership of marketing, advertising, and copy to grow top-of-funnel

• Regular blogging to build the community and position our company as a thought leader

• Tracking and reporting of analytics to drive decisions

• Lead expansion of online and in-person offerings

Please find more details and apply here: https://angel.co/firststepcoding/jobs/478698-growth-marketin...

I’m trying to think of use-cases for trusted stable-coins. The obvious one is just another way to sell products — this has failed for Bitcoin due to volatility risk.

One scenario I can think of is a decentralized e-reader and e-book marketplace:

- you have an e-reader app that is capable of decrypting books stored somewhere, as long as the content was encrypted with your public key

- authors publish their books to contracts that accept payments via an ERC20 stable-coin

- the contract responds by encrypting a copy of the book with your public key and placing it at a location your e-reader can retrieve it

Are there inherent advantages to a decentralized book store vs. Amazon though? Not sure…

This feels a bit to me like saying: "electric cars still have to charge their batteries somewhere, and they aren't necessarily being charged with renewable energy."

Electric cars provide the capability to power a car with renewable energy. Powering the grid with electric energy is a separate problem.

IPFS provides the capability of distribution. Incentivizing pinning is indeed a separate problem, but providing this capability feels like a huge step forward to me.

I'm seeing more of these "anti-blockchain" criticisms circulating lately. This one makes valid points about problems with the present state of the ecosystem, but the author seems to ignore the fact that these problems are addressable.

His basic criticism of smart contracts is they can have bugs, and they can be costly since they will often involve moving money. Yes, this is a fact. Many potential solutions are out there, but how about these two ideas for starters:

- a crypto-currency where at least accounts for certain transactions can be de-anonymized, so a person can be identified and face consequences when they commit a crime like hacking.

- special transactions with settlement periods in which they can be canceled in the event of a hack, which might be identified by voter consensus.

I recall that https://bitcoinbuilder.com allowed people to purchase locked up GOX coins during this fiasco. This would be a good time to check up on those accounts.

It seems like Wikipedia would be familiar with a lot of the same challenges that come with identifying fake news articles. Anyone more familiar than I am with Wikipedia care to comment?

You can also give yourself a nice head start by remixing one of GoMix's bots: https://gomix.com/community/handy-bots

(I have no affiliation, but I'm a fan of Fog Creek and super excited by this product.)

A feature I'd love to see: sync to AirPods.

I imagine it won't happen because in some ways it's kind of backwards, but I hate running with my phone, especially because I have a huge 6+.

It seems like a simple thing to just want to be able to take some of my music/podcasts with me running, but it's not realistic unless I own a separate iPod shuffle that I then have to deal with. Adding a small amount of memory to AirPods would make this possible and relatively seamless.

Congrats to the team on launching this!

I just made my way through the first few sections. This is really great content, and I think you've done a nice job of making it accessible to beginners.

I'll be pointing many of my bootcamp prep learners to it for practice.

This is the coolest project I've heard about in a while. Thanks for sharing!

Great piece. I started First Step Coding, one of the programs listed, and the greatest benefit I see in these programs is the chance to try out coding before getting fully committed.

Some of my students find out they love coding and have an opportunity to get into a more selective bootcamp. Others get a lower risk opportunity to fail fast. I consider both of these to be great outcomes in a prep program.

That's a fair point. I should add another path for if the person knows they want to work on mobile apps. Otherwise, I'd still offer all the same advice though.

First Step Coding | San Francisco, CA | Part time | ONSITE

I am hiring part-time Ruby and JavaScript instructors to help me introduce beginners to the world of coding.

First Step Coding is not a bootcamp. We offer a 4 week part-time prep program for people who are considering a career change, before they make the leap into a larger investment in their coding education.

Courses are in evenings from 6:30pm-9:30pm PST, so you don't have to quit your day job to help out as an instructor.

You also do not need to have teaching experience to apply. This is a great way to try out teaching with a light commitment if it's something you've thought about before.

You can reach me at: andy@firststepcoding.com You can read more info about the program at: http://firststepcoding.com

Really nice work on this. I would have loved this tool on my last big web project.

Couldn't agree more. I'm severely directionally challenged so I'm eager to try this - I do wish the price was a bit lower, but I suppose that will come with time.

I've been watching Peter König's research on this topic for some time. I was notified via email this morning that they are working to finally productize it:

"This is Susan Wache writing to you from the feelSpace project.

I received your e-mail from Prof. Peter König because you were interested in our experiments with tactile belts and to participate as a subject.

Our project has developed further. Apart from scientific research with the compass belt, we are now also well on our way to provide a commercial version of the tactile belt, including compass functionalities and navigation functionality, effectively guiding you via vibrations directly to any location you want to go to.

A lot of positive feedback from our subjects, blind and non-blind, but also my own enthusiasm after wearing the belt for over 6 months lead to the next step: In November 2015, my two colleagues Silke Kaercher, Jessika Schwandt and I founded a startup: the feelSpace GmbH.

We are close to a first product version of our tactile belt, targeting especially but not exclusively blind people, and thus are running a crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo: http://igg.me/at/feelspace-navibelt"

Interesting. Would you mind elaborating?

This is a great point. Can you imagine if every college major published its job placement stats and average salary?

Something else to consider - how sure are you that you enjoy coding and it's something you can be good at? I highly recommend taking the time to evaluate this before you commit to a bootcamp as well. Feel free to email me (address in my profile) if you'd like me to elaborate.

Love this. Some bootcamps are doing the world a great service, but there are also an increasing number of sharks in the water.

I run a 4-week "pre-bootcamp" program to help advise students on making the right choice. I hold my classes in the evenings so students can try out coding before they make the HUGE commitment of quitting their jobs and shelling out 10-20k for a bootcamp.

Sometimes, the right choice is to not try to be a coder. People get excited about six figure job prospects, but the truth is that coding isn't for everyone. The right approach is allow students to "fail fast," just like a startup. I do believe everyone should at least be exposed to coding so they can make an educated decision about it though.

On a slight tangent, I'd love to see more coding schools putting their money where there mouths are by offering income-based repayment (IBR). I've worked as an instructor at a coding school offering IBR, and I've seen first hand how much of good thing it is for everyone when success incentives are aligned.

What was lacking in Atom for you?

Super cool concept. One thought: when I'm using my laptop I have limited screen space. It would be awesome to be able to use Kite on my phone's screen, with my phone clipped to my laptop using something like this: https://tenonedesign.com/mountie.php

Scrum at its core is about setting your team up to LEARN and improve by introducing feedback cycles.

That's it.

If your team learns after one cycle that they are more effective without one of the common ceremonies, then your team should drop it.

The problem that Adam is observing is not with Scrum itself - it's that too many miseducated managers lose sight of the point and are obsessing over the wrong details.

Source: I have been on extremely successful Scrum teams, I have seen Scrum done properly dramatically transform "stale" teams, and I have trained with Jeff Sutherland, one of Scrum's founders.

I'd like to see them get into the enterprise space and build a subscription management platform in the same space as Zuora. They certainly have the domain expertise, design, and engineering talent to do this.

Slightly off-topic, but I recently interviewed at Square, and I also have some long-time contacts there. I can honestly say they have some of the most brilliant engineering minds I have encountered working there. Whether it's a trickle-down effect from Dorsey or otherwise, they have succeeded in recruiting and retaining many extremely talented individuals.

I am curious if anyone has recent anecdotes in regards to the engineering talent at Twitter (aside from the talent that came in with Periscope).

I love the idea of JRuby, but I found the community was weak when I did my exploration. Granted, that was about 1.5 years ago.

+1 for Dropwizard. Setting up Dropwizard was a breathe of fresh air in the Java world.

If you can swing it for your project, I would suggest trying to sidestep ORM altogether by using a NoSQL database like MongoDB.

I made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next.

It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.

Yeah, same thing. It's definitely hit or miss, but FWIW I am connected to one now (I guess a random person's router nearby) and it is very fast.

Like most people, I'm not normally a Comcast fan, but this is really interesting.

It's really convenient in San Francisco because I can almost always find a network to connect to, but I do wonder about security implications of having this feature enabled by default on my home router.