songzme

> Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained.

If you believe that, then it will be true for you. Alot of things are free. If you plant a potato you can end up with a whole field of potatoes that you can eat forever, for free. And all the potatoes you don't eat decomposes back into the soil and makes the soil healthier.

Nature is fundamentally free and abundant and I can't figure out why our society isn't. Everyone around me seems to conclude that nothing is free though so maybe there's something I see that others don't, or there's something everyone else sees that I don't.

> You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it!

I haven't proven anything yet and I have learned alot. You seem to have reached a conclusion though, care to share how?

good. It is difficult, but interesting.

I don't think students should pay for education, correct. I would enjoy life more if education was free and I'm free to pursue whatever I wanted to learn.

It would be even cooler if I was paid to learn so teachers get to experiment with all different ways to teach and they are fully vested into my growth.

I'm not really comfortable talking about this because is just speculation and I don't have enough time / data to defend my position. If you have specific questions though please contact me.

Thanks, but I've come to realize that I'm not altruistic so I want to clarify so you don't leave with the wrong message.

I'm using my wealth to build a learning environment and remove obstacles so I can observe what the true barriers to learning are. I essentially created my own lab because it was too much work to convince others to create it for me.

So, I'm not the good person that my story seems to convey, just curious.

> ...but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost.

I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. I'd rather have them keep their money so they can help improve the world in their own way.

> The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse.

Worse for who? Society? I don't believe it is my job to fix societal problems. I can help in a way that makes it fun and interesting for me and if any of the graduates want to continue providing the service and charge 5-20% of the students pay, they are free to launch their own service. Everything is open source.

You comment was downvoted but I upvoted it because you bring up a valid point. I've noticed first hand the free-rider problem and I have mixed feelings.

I thought it was interesting that all students with the free-rider symptoms did not feel good about free-riding. They tried to help out and feel bad when we meet for 1-1 and they haven't done much.

Sometimes, I feel like I'm actually fighting against FAANG because these companies are spending billions trying to capture as much of my students' attention as possible and I have to spend more time helping manage my students out of these distractions.

I'm actually starting to wonder if the free-rider problem exists because of FAANG creating addictive content and the media glorifying a certain lifestyle. If students were not exposed to these distractions, would they still be free-riding? I honestly don't think so and my next year's plan is to try and simulate this.

> Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply?

No vetting process, it was first come first served. As long as a student kept showing up, I will do everything I can to help. I don't advertise paying students, I offer it after I've seen them make some progress.

> I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required.

This actually happened to a few students. But in their defense, I would do the same. If I had been struggling month to month and suddenly I get a chance to breath and relax, I would relax.

I've been trying to condition myself to be okay giving money to people and not expecting anything in return (in the spirit of basic income). It is a hard path to take emotionally but I am making progress.

> I contemplated doing something similar in London (not paying money per-se, but providing a location & good hardware for the students to use) but was kind of worried about ending up with an office full of freeloaders that just enjoy the amenities provided without caring about the curriculum itself.

This will happen. People will find a way to build a community with regular parties and alcohol and weed and other drugs will come in. Some students will start binge watching TV shows, start gaming, etc. You need to make sure to set some fundamental rules.

The way I plan to solve this (next year) could be very controversial, but I believe it based on my experiences so far: No internet until you finish the curriculum, no alcohol, no drugs. Maybe also no meat but that's still up in the air.

> I've experimented with a few people I know that are stuck in bullshit jobs and gave them hardware, software and any books/resources they'd need to learn programming, but while they are very grateful for it I haven't actually seen any progress or frankly even long-term motivation.

That's how I started and the reason why there is no long-term motivation is that there is nobody around them to help them manage their feelings. Once you help them manage their feelings, their drive is infinite.

If you want to talk more, shoot me a message in the chatroom on c0d3.com (my username is gnos), I'll be happy to share everything (curriculum, apps that powers the curriculum, vision, etc).

The way I see it, I'm paying to study how people learn and how people's standing in society affects their learning. It is very interesting and definitely opened my eyes and helped change my philosophy in life.

I haven't learned enough to confidently strategize a way to keep this sustainable, because I noticed a pattern between people who don't do well and their personality (but I can't quite put my finger on it). I'm still observing and trying to figure this one out.

2016 - While working as an engineer at Google, I decided to start a free coding bootcamp on the side. I believed I could teach anyone how to become a software engineer so I made a public post asking if anyone is interested in learning how to code and about 30 people showed up at my house. While I was at work in Mountain View, 30 people strangers used my house as a coding bootcamp.

2017 - 30 students were hard to manage and students started leaving. It bothered me, so I quit my job at Google to focus on this full time. I reached out to the students who left to see what happened and one of the reasons was money. So for the students who are struggling financially, I started giving them 2k / mo stipend.

2018 - Paying 9 students 2k / month used up all of my savings so I had to look for a new job. Also started a non-profit to write off all my payments as donations. This helped alot because to keep paying the students I took out my 401k savings and the donations helped offset the tax penalty.

2019 - Students got jobs. Realized that I want to train students to become good solid engineers that I want to work with instead of gamifying the interview process. Instead of padding resume and LeetCode, our curriculum focuses on building good products with good tests and maintainable code.

2020 - Ran into financial trouble, had to let all the students go and gave them a 3 month notice.

Now I'm primarily lurking on the chatroom of our final product, helping and teaching students who are following my curriculum.

https://c0d3.com

Next year I will get more RSUs and with that money I plan to kickoff a free code house, a safe environment for students to learn (much like 42) with free food and housing.

not enough engagement. If I reach out to students and engage in conversations with them regularly, they have a higher chance of following through. I start high up in the funnel, to pay utmost attention to students who are at the end (JS6). Then when I have free time, I go down the funnel and pull students up. As I polish the end, I get more and more time to engage with students lower in the funnel. I just reach out and say hi, ask them why they are learning and if they have any questions and concerns.

I have a hard time sorting through the ml logic vs the game logic, it would really help my learning (and others too) if the game logic was decoupled from the ml logic into 2 separate files.

make sure to remember your promises to yourself. Many people get stuck in the fame and glamor and stop giving a shit.

as they learn, I want them to build reliable open source products that will be useful and maintainable after they find jobs and leave. Since less experienced engineers are prone to making mistakes, TypeScript have been really helpful in maintaining code quality. I think its a win win for their growth and for code quality.

Thank you, I updated.

When students engage with me to ask questions, I usually just ask them directly: "If you decide that this isn't for you, please let me or someone else on the team know before you do so we understand how we can make this a better learning platform for future students"

good idea, probably the long term goal. We just got the engineering standards figured out, will slowly me towards that idea :)

yes. Interactive in the sense that there is a chatroom and you can interact with other student mentors / engineers on there.

really cool. Did you build the whole thing yourself? it has so many functionalities I can get lost digging and playing into this.

I misspoke. I think hiring is more standardized within companies now, and it is trending that way.

I can only speak for places I've worked at.

Google has an internal interview committee to provide unbiased reviews. Before you interview, you need to understand the repository of questions asked and how to interview candidates.

PayPal varies team by team, but each team tries to standardize the kind of candidates that they are looking for.

I agree, I haven't had time to revisit it to improve the wording, will do it tonight. This is really what I meant:

Our decision behind JavaScript:

We want our students to understand technology at a conceptual level first, end to end:

1. Client side - Mobile, web, terminal 2. Server side - Database interactions, system design and optimization 3. Batch - ML models and scripting

AFAIK, JavaScript is the only language that is able to cover everything end to end (front end to backend to scripting to even ML) so I'm able to come up with appropriate exercises for each of the moving parts.

Afterwards, they should pickup domain specific language that optimizes for each task.

I think it may be too overwhelming for students to learn different languages and learn the high level concepts at the same time.

Unfortunately, there may be more instances of word choices. Each lesson is about 4-5k words (totaling 30k) and I simply don't have enough time to think critically on every word so feedback like these helps. Feel free to bring these up in the chatroom and help us improve our wording!

> software engineering is more than code. Software developers live, breathe, and puke software development.

100% agree. Which is why its important that students are working together on projects so they can write specs, documentation, tests and structure code in a way that the next engineer can take over easily. Our weekly sprint planning helps facilitate that.

Take this PR for example, it has tests and went through 15+ comments and approved by 2 other students before it got merged in: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/pull/243

I think your are thinking of a curriculum that just teaches students how to code and then have them build side projects by themselves and show it off. And I agree, that is not software engineering, it is just code.

> I take titles such as "engineer" are not equally regulated everywhere in the world?

Yes. And the interview process that software companies have are trying to standardize it.

> Can you really become a chartered engineer by going through this course?

It depends on you. Building and maintaining a product that people use on a daily basis that will exist and thrive long after you stop working on it is the essence of good software engineering.

did you type in a username / email with an uppercase letter? that's the only issue we've discovered so far with the signup process.

we got a sentry.io alert of an error, we think this may be you. filed a bug: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/issues/244

I agree. I'm actually trying to model more of this mindset into the curriculum.

> The real necessity is working with people to understand the details of their own problems and what they want to get out of it and then engineering an approach that effectively handles that going forward

c0d3.com' target audience: people who want to become good engineers.

Our solution: To immerse students in an work environment where they communicate with each other, code review each other, build features together, observe users, and update features.

It's meant to be an alternative to aggressive leetcoding and problem/solution memorizing, which is a brute force way to get into engineering without really understanding the details of why they want to get into engineering in the first place.

Yeah after the curriculum, the students transition to using typescript. It is a natural progression towards wanting to type your function arguments and return values for clarity and consistency.