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I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to ta

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going "ahhh" when something clicked for them. Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.

cheshireoctopus 7y ago
This is really inspiring. Thank you for sharing. Few questions if you do not mind: 1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students? 2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons? 3. How do you avoid burnout? 4. Do you plan on open sourcing your lessons?
- songzme 7y ago
  Thanks for asking! 1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room / parking even though we only have 4 consistent students. (Libraries love it when tech community volunteers to help teach). 2. I was honest with students that I can't help everyone and my time is limited (though I try). If they helped each other it would make my life easier. They have been good at helping each other. 3. I don't understand burnout, I'm guessing it's a symptom of ambition and expectations (I'm really not sure because I've never understood it. If I experienced it previously I never noticed). I just make sure to have no expectations. All I hold myself accountable for is to show up. If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help. 4. Yes. I want to open source it completely, such that if people wanted to repackage it into their own bootcamp they have the freedom to do so (not sure what license that would be, but I'm not at that point yet). Right now I just document everything in notion: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3821a9af8a5e2 https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...
  - RankingMember 7y ago
    > If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help. This is such a good mindset and, knowing myself and those around me, a rare one.
  - cheshireoctopus 7y ago
    Appreciate you taking the time to answer. I am really into what you are building here - are you looking for volunteers to help?
    - songzme 7y ago
      Yeah! We are always needing help. Just consistently show up if you are around the area and answer questions. Or signup and go through help people in the chatroom! The instructions are here: https://www.notion.so/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3821a9af8a5e2 https://www.notion.so/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3... Basically... if you are a seasoned engineer, just going through what we are working with and being curious about it and understanding our approach is really helpful. What wouldn't be helpful is to show up (in person or online), try to implement a bunch of new changes without understanding the current student journey, and then don't follow through. The intention is good, but I think the students end up more confused.
Vinnl 7y ago
In the Netherlands (and by now a couple of other countries, I believe), there's a similar initiative called HackYourFuture [1], in which professional developers volunteer to teach refugees to code. This contributes to solving both to the lack of developers, and the challenges refugees face in contributing to the country they migrated to. It's really gratifying, and with volunteer sessions being limited to three Sundays in a row every now and then, less taxing than going there before work every day. [1] https://www.hackyourfuture.net/program/ https://www.hackyourfuture.net/program/
snisarenko 7y ago
This is very generous, to donate your time like this. Just wanted to say you are doing a very good thing.
20years 7y ago
This is awesome! I love hearing that others are doing this. I do something similar but I run after school clubs. I work mostly with 5th through 8th graders and run clubs 5 days per week in 5 different local schools. It is a lot of work but so rewarding and I feel it has made me a better developer. I myself have learned so much from doing it. I have met so many amazing kids & parents too and it's made me a much bigger part of my community.
- songzme 7y ago
  I love hearing stories like this, and I feel what you feel. Definitely rewarding and fun, playing a bigger part in your local community feels amazing.
runako 7y ago
This is fantastic! Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard, so it's also worth noting that there is a whole range of options for folks. Obviously, there are public and community colleges that teach programming. Many of these have a long history of working with non-traditional students who have jobs or other commitments. Some are remote-only or remote-friendly. In my state (GA), tuition for an accredited public community college is about $6,000 over 2 years for a programming diploma. That's $3,000 per year, and there's no income share required. (I'm not sure if people can do it faster for less money.) There are also a set of nonprofits and foundations that offer free programming programs to certain populations. I believe NYC has something along these lines.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard These are very much not the same. For profit schools have an incentive to get more students through while maintaining an acceptable level of quality because that way they make more money. Non-profits have much less motivation to make more money. If they get more applications than they want to fill their prestige goes up as does the quality of their student body. So you see the top US universities having more or less the same size student bodies as when there were 200m people living in the US. Non-profits optimise for a pleasant work environment for faculty, for profits for maximum numbers students.
  - songzme 7y ago
    > Non-profits optimize for a pleasant work environment for faculty Some do, some don't. Some Non-profits optimize for maximize impact to their vision. > for profits for maximum numbers students. Some do, some don't. Some for-profits optimize a small number of wealthy clients.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Please tell me of these non-profit schools that maximise for impact to their vision, or for-profit schools that optimise for small numbers of wealthy clients.
hundt 7y ago
This is very cool! How did you choose the curriculum that you are following?
- songzme 7y ago
  I made it over time based on observations with my coworkers and my personal work experience (I'm currently a tech lead at PayPal, formerly L4 at Google). What I want to do is to teach people to become good engineers, getting a job should be a side effect of that. I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to show up at the library every day.
  - simplify 7y ago
    If neither you nor universities think that getting a job is more important than becoming a "good engineer" (whatever that means), then who is left to fill this void but the bootcamps you disagree with?
    - songzme 7y ago
      I think if a bootcamp is good enough, it will feed people directly into jobs (possibly without even a technical interview). This is my dream, I have no idea how realistic it is. My library experience (and my work experience) is one giant experience to find out. If I find some great engineers in the library and bring them into my team directly, will they do good work? If they prove to do good engineering, would it be a sustainable model to hire directly from our volunteer program? If this works out, we could replicate this model in other public libraries as well. The comments above are my moonshot ideas, I'm currently experimenting to see if it can be possible.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
taytus 7y ago
Thank you for the inspiration. I'm tempted now to start doing the same myself.
- songzme 7y ago
  Do it! We can share ideas :) You can reach me via email: library at zheng.network
LordFast 7y ago
Kudos to you for your actions. Much respect.
byproxy 7y ago
As someone making a somewhat-late-in-life career change (foisted upon me, of course), thanks for the site! I'm not a beginner coder, but I haven't worked on projects in a team environment before, so I signed up on c0d3.com hoping to gain some experience. Any pointers?
- songzme 7y ago
  Not sure what pointers you are looking for, but you can start by saying hi in the chatroom. If you think it is helpful, you can breeze through the lessons and exercises so you know / understand how other students use the curriculum, then work with the more senior students as a team on c0d3.com and build features to make it better. Proudly put all your contributions (features, mentoring work, authoring work - if you contributed to the course material) on your resume.
baron816 7y ago
I tried to do something similar, but more as a mentoring program. I’ve been thinking about trying to do that with my company (having us mentor people outside the company—as a recruiting tool). One thing I suggest is focus on code reviews for your students. I think that’s the best way to tech programming. They’ve already taken a stab at something, so writing comments on how it can be done better and why that way is better is much more useful than a lecture about something abstract.
- songzme 7y ago
  You nailed it. I focus on code reviews and I agree that its the best way to teach programing. It teaches them how to structure their code to be maintainable. Just getting it to work is not good enough, you have to think about the engineer who is going to take over your code one day.
tmpz22 7y ago
FAANGM has left us with an impression that if you build a decent product you will magically make so much money that you can divert portions of it to a fancy office, great salaries, open source and other philanthropic causes, with no consequences. The truth is few industries carry that much of a margin especially when VC, founders, and seniors, take so much off the top. It's my opinion that some companies should never be done for profit, particularly Political Tech but also other social tech including portions of ed tech. These industries should be left for FI/RE folks who are rewarded with various social credits, like awards, tax credits, and peer validation.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things, even a profitable one.
- dandelo1953 7y ago
  wouldn't be surprised if there's typically a "finance" guy making profit driven/marketing decisions pulling emotional strings on a the (willingly) naive "entrepreneur" partner
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Why do you believe that the folks running bootcamps are "tech people" themselves? If they weren't, would the profit notice make sense?
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Well they must at least be aware of the tech scene and how it works, since they're working closely with it.
    - pyuser583 7y ago
      But they’re not. They’re salesmen selling a product to uneducated people. There’s no requirement they be part of the “tech scene” ... whatever that is.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        > “tech scene” ... whatever that is The companies they're trying to get people hired into.
chrstphrknwtn 7y ago
This is such a great demonstration of the value of public libraries.

cheshireoctopus 7y ago

This is really inspiring. Thank you for sharing. Few questions if you do not mind: 1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students? 2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons? 3. How do you avoid burnout? 4. Do you plan on open sourcing your lessons?

songzme 7y ago
Thanks for asking! 1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room / parking even though we only have 4 consistent students. (Libraries love it when tech community volunteers to help teach). 2. I was honest with students that I can't help everyone and my time is limited (though I try). If they helped each other it would make my life easier. They have been good at helping each other. 3. I don't understand burnout, I'm guessing it's a symptom of ambition and expectations (I'm really not sure because I've never understood it. If I experienced it previously I never noticed). I just make sure to have no expectations. All I hold myself accountable for is to show up. If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help. 4. Yes. I want to open source it completely, such that if people wanted to repackage it into their own bootcamp they have the freedom to do so (not sure what license that would be, but I'm not at that point yet). Right now I just document everything in notion: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3821a9af8a5e2 https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-Contents-a83980f...
- RankingMember 7y ago
  > If I did something wrong I apologize and move on, there's no point beating myself up over anything. I don't have big ambitions to make millions and millions, I just want physically show up for people who need help. This is such a good mindset and, knowing myself and those around me, a rare one.
- cheshireoctopus 7y ago
  Appreciate you taking the time to answer. I am really into what you are building here - are you looking for volunteers to help?
  - songzme 7y ago
    Yeah! We are always needing help. Just consistently show up if you are around the area and answer questions. Or signup and go through help people in the chatroom! The instructions are here: https://www.notion.so/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3821a9af8a5e2 https://www.notion.so/Table-of-Contents-a83980f81560429faca3... Basically... if you are a seasoned engineer, just going through what we are working with and being curious about it and understanding our approach is really helpful. What wouldn't be helpful is to show up (in person or online), try to implement a bunch of new changes without understanding the current student journey, and then don't follow through. The intention is good, but I think the students end up more confused.

Vinnl 7y ago

In the Netherlands (and by now a couple of other countries, I believe), there's a similar initiative called HackYourFuture [1], in which professional developers volunteer to teach refugees to code. This contributes to solving both to the lack of developers, and the challenges refugees face in contributing to the country they migrated to. It's really gratifying, and with volunteer sessions being limited to three Sundays in a row every now and then, less taxing than going there before work every day. [1] https://www.hackyourfuture.net/program/ https://www.hackyourfuture.net/program/

snisarenko 7y ago

This is very generous, to donate your time like this. Just wanted to say you are doing a very good thing.

20years 7y ago

This is awesome! I love hearing that others are doing this. I do something similar but I run after school clubs. I work mostly with 5th through 8th graders and run clubs 5 days per week in 5 different local schools. It is a lot of work but so rewarding and I feel it has made me a better developer. I myself have learned so much from doing it. I have met so many amazing kids & parents too and it's made me a much bigger part of my community.

songzme 7y ago
I love hearing stories like this, and I feel what you feel. Definitely rewarding and fun, playing a bigger part in your local community feels amazing.

runako 7y ago

This is fantastic! Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard, so it's also worth noting that there is a whole range of options for folks. Obviously, there are public and community colleges that teach programming. Many of these have a long history of working with non-traditional students who have jobs or other commitments. Some are remote-only or remote-friendly. In my state (GA), tuition for an accredited public community college is about $6,000 over 2 years for a programming diploma. That's $3,000 per year, and there's no income share required. (I'm not sure if people can do it faster for less money.) There are also a set of nonprofits and foundations that offer free programming programs to certain populations. I believe NYC has something along these lines.

barry-cotter 7y ago
> Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard These are very much not the same. For profit schools have an incentive to get more students through while maintaining an acceptable level of quality because that way they make more money. Non-profits have much less motivation to make more money. If they get more applications than they want to fill their prestige goes up as does the quality of their student body. So you see the top US universities having more or less the same size student bodies as when there were 200m people living in the US. Non-profits optimise for a pleasant work environment for faculty, for profits for maximum numbers students.
- songzme 7y ago
  > Non-profits optimize for a pleasant work environment for faculty Some do, some don't. Some Non-profits optimize for maximize impact to their vision. > for profits for maximum numbers students. Some do, some don't. Some for-profits optimize a small number of wealthy clients.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Please tell me of these non-profit schools that maximise for impact to their vision, or for-profit schools that optimise for small numbers of wealthy clients.

hundt 7y ago

This is very cool! How did you choose the curriculum that you are following?

songzme 7y ago
I made it over time based on observations with my coworkers and my personal work experience (I'm currently a tech lead at PayPal, formerly L4 at Google). What I want to do is to teach people to become good engineers, getting a job should be a side effect of that. I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to show up at the library every day.
- simplify 7y ago
  If neither you nor universities think that getting a job is more important than becoming a "good engineer" (whatever that means), then who is left to fill this void but the bootcamps you disagree with?
  - songzme 7y ago
    I think if a bootcamp is good enough, it will feed people directly into jobs (possibly without even a technical interview). This is my dream, I have no idea how realistic it is. My library experience (and my work experience) is one giant experience to find out. If I find some great engineers in the library and bring them into my team directly, will they do good work? If they prove to do good engineering, would it be a sustainable model to hire directly from our volunteer program? If this works out, we could replicate this model in other public libraries as well. The comments above are my moonshot ideas, I'm currently experimenting to see if it can be possible.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

taytus 7y ago

Thank you for the inspiration. I'm tempted now to start doing the same myself.

songzme 7y ago
Do it! We can share ideas :) You can reach me via email: library at zheng.network

LordFast 7y ago

Kudos to you for your actions. Much respect.

byproxy 7y ago

As someone making a somewhat-late-in-life career change (foisted upon me, of course), thanks for the site! I'm not a beginner coder, but I haven't worked on projects in a team environment before, so I signed up on c0d3.com hoping to gain some experience. Any pointers?

songzme 7y ago
Not sure what pointers you are looking for, but you can start by saying hi in the chatroom. If you think it is helpful, you can breeze through the lessons and exercises so you know / understand how other students use the curriculum, then work with the more senior students as a team on c0d3.com and build features to make it better. Proudly put all your contributions (features, mentoring work, authoring work - if you contributed to the course material) on your resume.

baron816 7y ago

I tried to do something similar, but more as a mentoring program. I’ve been thinking about trying to do that with my company (having us mentor people outside the company—as a recruiting tool). One thing I suggest is focus on code reviews for your students. I think that’s the best way to tech programming. They’ve already taken a stab at something, so writing comments on how it can be done better and why that way is better is much more useful than a lecture about something abstract.

songzme 7y ago
You nailed it. I focus on code reviews and I agree that its the best way to teach programing. It teaches them how to structure their code to be maintainable. Just getting it to work is not good enough, you have to think about the engineer who is going to take over your code one day.

tmpz22 7y ago

FAANGM has left us with an impression that if you build a decent product you will magically make so much money that you can divert portions of it to a fancy office, great salaries, open source and other philanthropic causes, with no consequences. The truth is few industries carry that much of a margin especially when VC, founders, and seniors, take so much off the top. It's my opinion that some companies should never be done for profit, particularly Political Tech but also other social tech including portions of ed tech. These industries should be left for FI/RE folks who are rewarded with various social credits, like awards, tax credits, and peer validation.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things, even a profitable one.

dandelo1953 7y ago
wouldn't be surprised if there's typically a "finance" guy making profit driven/marketing decisions pulling emotional strings on a the (willingly) naive "entrepreneur" partner
lallysingh 7y ago
Why do you believe that the folks running bootcamps are "tech people" themselves? If they weren't, would the profit notice make sense?
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Well they must at least be aware of the tech scene and how it works, since they're working closely with it.
  - pyuser583 7y ago
    But they’re not. They’re salesmen selling a product to uneducated people. There’s no requirement they be part of the “tech scene” ... whatever that is.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > “tech scene” ... whatever that is The companies they're trying to get people hired into.

chrstphrknwtn 7y ago

This is such a great demonstration of the value of public libraries.