mrborgen

I just did this actually. I ran a startup for 2.5 years as the CEO, and when we ran out of money, I moved to London for 3-4 months and joined the code school/coding cooperative Founders&Coders. Never learned as much in so short time ever.

It's probably best to try and learn something that you get excited about learning. You're going to be your own motivator, and if you give up half ways, it's probably not worth it.

Another tip is to try to get in touch with a community of people you can learn together with. After I moved away from London, I've learned a lot less, even though I have just as much time. I'm just not around as knowledge hungry people. This makes all the difference.

Another technique is to try and devote one week to a subject and check if you like it. I did it with machine learning: https://medium.com/@oslokommuneper/machine-learning-in-a-wee...

You can try coding, design, marketing etc. Whatever you like. Worst case, you waste a week. Best case, you discover a new passion.

Thanks for all the input, there is a lot of important concepts here, which I'll definitely look into implementing into the course! However, I'm very cautious of making it too theoretical. I want the students to experience the joy of building something, as I see that as critical for developing further motivation and curiosity.

Sure, drop me a mail at perhborgen@gmail.com!

Yeah, that would most certainly keep them motivated, as it's a lot easier when you can relate to WHY your are learning how to code. The one-on-one mentoring through Skype is a great idea. I hadn't thought of that, thanks for the tip!

Agreed!

One to one tutorship would be great, but we wont have enough teachers for that. Too expensive yes. I'm thinking lectures and tasks, and preferably more of the latter and less of the former :)

Thanks a lot for the input! Project based learning has always worked best for me too, so I'm considering to run it as a "make x in 5 days" course. Using the Twitter API might be a good idea. Then they'll understand how to communicate with other services, which is critical. But it might be a bit too difficult for a complete beginner?

Perhaps the final 3 days can be project based, and then use the first two to cover some basics.

This is brilliant. I've been looking for an explanation like this, which truly understands the perspective of a beginner. Thanks!

Sure, as long as you're able to provide value to a company, you can get a job. I recently got a job at a startup as a frontend developer, after going through a 3 month coding bootcamp. I had been learning coding on my spare time a couple of years before that, but no formal CS education. As for websites, use Upwork to get some clients. Won't be well paid, but it's a start and will help you grow your portfolio.

Great job! May I ask how much money you set off to do marketing before you launched?

Thanks, I've been listening to The Talking Machines for a while. It's really good!

http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/

Awesome, this looks like a great plan! Quite a lot of setup, so I'll start during the weekend :)

Awesome, thanks, I'll definitely test out that dataset! Btw, have you proceeded with any MOOC's after Andrew Ng's ML course? Anyone you'd like to recommend?

Thanks a lot for all the advise! Using a library at first seems like a good idea. And then go deeper into the material as I learn the the practicalities, rather than doing it the other way around.

I'll definitely continue on after next week. It's just meant as a kick start. This tutorial series seems like a good way to start with scikit-learn btw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URTZ2jKCgBc&list=PLQVvvaa0Qu...

Thanks for the tips!

I'm considering to use a dataset Bank of England has about households in England. As far as I understand, the data can be used for both prediction and classification. It has quite a lot of different features.

Which one would you recommend to start with, in general?

Just realised that I mixed the courses up. The one I did was simply called "Machine Learning" and not "Intro to Machine Learning". Anyway, thanks for the tip, I'll check it out!

I haven't, but I surely will! Thanks for the tip.

Thanks for the feedback! It's very important to choose keywords that are strongly related to your app.

However, that a very difficult task to solve with an app, so were sticking to give you an overview over how they are performing. It's up to each user to jugde wether or no his/hers keywords are relevant for the app :)

We have no interest in using the keywords to anything other than giving you an overview over how they are preforming. Plus, you can easily scrape this info from the iTunes Search API if you query it for all the words in the english alphabet, so its not worth much..

Hi,

I'd recommend going more spesific with your keywords. And try to look for double keyword combinations you can rank high for. For example, even though you might rank low for both 'snake' and 'game', you will rank higher for 'snake game'. So remember to fill in any important double keyword combinations.

Here is an article we wrote about the development by the way: https://medium.com/@gregaubs/a39477d2242a

Very nice! I love how easy you have made it to start a new fiddle, eliminating the signup. I'm all in for less signup walls on the internet!

I have thought about it. It's just a working title, we'll probably change it throughout the week to something more 'serious'. Any suggestions?

This is the project we landed on after asking HN for help with problems to solve last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210981

It is! I will take your advice and do it. Almost every time I talk to potential customers I'm surprised over the amount of valuable info I get from the chat.

Definitely! I'll look into this one.

Mind sending me an email or connecting on LinkedIn? I'd be very interested in getting your input in the future: per@forlagetpropell.no https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=92593053

Doesn't Google Maps work well for this?

Not just to all coding bootcamps students, but to all coders/founders/creators. I've met very few who actually do it, spanning from amateurs to experienced developers.