yjhoney

Thanks for reminding people be aware. Fundraising wasn't the point of my original comment, so I took out the donation link. My focus primarily has been to teach students, so I haven't had time to update any of the social media or the landing page.

I lost the pw to my original account on HN, but here's my username: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=songzme

Thanks for the healthy dose of skepticism. We moved away from Github (their closed source policy always seemed fishy to me) and started hosting our own gitlab instance instead. Some products our students are building: llip.io and c0d3.com.

The students working on llip.io built an android/ios react-native app as well as a webapp. Everyone working on that project got a job, so there is no development on that anymore.

The remaining group of students is working on c0d3.com and running beta on it. Currently they volunteer at the library with FCC on Saturdays to get more people using it to improve it. If you want to meet them, show up for the Saturday meetups! https://www.meetup.com/Free-Code-Camp-SF/events/qzddrmyxpbgc...

I do empathize with your concern though.

If there were fewer people interesting in taking up non-tech jobs, then supply/demand would drive up wages for non-tech jobs. So before we get to "barren wasteland of office buildings with no services", there would be a happy medium where service industries would be high paying.

I don't think a donation model is scalable if it came from corporations. In my group of friends of high income earners (> 200k), most of them donate less than 5% of their income.

Our students are grouped into teams to launch real products so they can list work experience on their resumes. When they start their interview process, they train new students on their codebase.

I think if some of our students launch profitable products that are sustainable, we could show corporations that it might make sense to invest and train their community and hire from there rather than constantly 'look for the best' around the world.

None of the paid students dropped out. If you were paid the same amount to improve yourself and learn vs packaging boxes at an amazon warehouse, I think the decision is easy.

We didn't have an interview process (in terms of selection). I was originally volunteering at a local library at a Free Code Camp meetup and got our first couple of students from there (the ones who really needed help). Afterwards it was word of mouth.

Finding students wasn't hard. We ran a 3 month pilot at our local library to teach coding for free (our students teaching the public) and many students showed up. In Silicon Valley, libraries wants to provide more technical resource / training but there aren't enough volunteers.

Tried to, but got rejected every time. I don't think we have the numbers. 20 doesn't seem like a number that scales very well. I might try again next year.

Thank you for sharing your story. I don't know the severity of your brother's disabilities but I believe that there is a potential place for him as a teacher to teach introductory courses (like JS basics, html, etc). The daily interaction someone like your brother might have with other people might help with his mental disabilities.

Just a my two cents, but I'm not trying to advocate for everyone to learn coding though. Simple jobs will always be there in the near future for those who need it. I just have a problem with people who are capable of a skilled jobs being forced into simple jobs because of financial reasons.

I'm currently just focused on helping students with their learning. I don't plan to do a Show HN until the remaining students get a job because I think the attention might be distracting. I plan to do a writeup after the remaining 6 students gets a job and while I take a breather, hope you get a chance to see it next year!

I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students.

Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time.

From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all full-stack software engineers.

If anyone wants to help out, send me an email to song at garagescript.org. I believe the real long term solution is to train under-served communities better and help them acquire technical skills.

edit remove donation link.

I work with my local library to hold coding office hours

(Should be very easy to set up, they really want to become more technically savvy but the only volunteers they could find is instructors trying to teach microsoft word)

I have my own curriculum that I've built over the years and the students ultimately end up building a product that they launch (hopefully). This year I got to teach 20 students and so far 14 have gotten full time jobs as software engineers. Fortunately, students who got jobs are all doing well at their jobs so its pretty easy to refer people in.

After the remaining 6 students get a full time job, I plan to open source my curriculum that students have helped polish over the years. You can find the gist of it at c0d3.com

Having taught people coding for awhile, I don't think the step-by-step teaching models work with coding. It creates an environment where students just think about the next step without internalizing what they learned. I've met students who have gone through freecodecamp's exercises and really struggle with using what they learned.

Edabit seems too heavily on algorithms. I've seen many beginner students get quickly burned out from doing algorithms when starting out.

I've found the most effective way to teach coding is to make their learning project based (very much like how professors taught concepts back in college). Build X, Y, Z, each project building up in complexity so students can think about different combinations of everything they learned to complete the project.

Unfortunately I feel the same way and it is hard to find any sort of happiness with this mindset. How do you handle?

thanks for sharing your QA. Just wanted to let you know that your profile looks amazing and wish you good luck on your job search.

Hi my name is Alberto Lopez and I'm looking for a Junior engineering role. I'm willing to learn and work hard to help your team achieve your vision.

Location: San Jose, CA

Remote: no

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Redux, Apollo, GraphQL, JavaScript, NodeJS

Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c-6ekx1Sn19FHOQD1sg0XeMe...

Email: albertolopez7@gmail.com