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What about having your students develop and launch a mock startup? Building small apps and going over books is great, but I think students can learn a lot more

What about having your students develop and launch a mock startup? Building small apps and going over books is great, but I think students can learn a lot more real world dev by actually doing it. You can still emphasize code quality, agile practices, working together on a team, etc. Put up everything on github and as they develop the startup make sure they are contributing back to whatever open source software they are using. Im assuming most of your students are interested in working for startups so giving them a mock startup experience would be a plus for them and also for the startups they eventually work for.

davidbalbert 15y ago
We have made an effort to make sure that Hacker School is not about startups and products. This is mostly from experience in prior batches: students who worked on producty or startupy ideas didn't get nearly as much out of the batch as students who were working on more technical stuff. Also, in NYC specifically, we feel that there isn't as much of a pure "hacker" scene. It's too intermingled with the startup world. We're trying to do our part to fix that.
nicholasjbs 15y ago
To expand on Dave's comment above a bit: While we're very much not about launching startups or products, we already do much of what you suggest. We encourage people to write useful code and build or contribute to open source projects. Hacker Schoolers frequently collaborate and pair. Everyone puts their code on Github. We emphasize code quality and writing clean, maintainable code you're proud of.
zemo 15y ago
I was in batch[1] and worked on the back end of a startup simultaneously, but not while on HS time. Having had the experience, I wouldn't recommend HS if you're more interested in startups than you are in programming. The goals are completely different. The measure of a startup's success can be directly observed, but you can't simply observe an overwhelming sense of curiosity or the triumphal sense of discovery. The reason I'm interested in startups is that it's a way to spend all of your time creating things that enrich other people's lives, which is exactly what we try to do at HS. Then you have the concept of ownership and monetary gain, but nobody really owns HS projects, they just happen. There are no contracts or points, there is only the joy of programming. When you naturally put people together that are all working to better themselves in the same way, they wind up cooperating. It's much easier to cooperate on something that's already shared. Now that's not to say that you can't do anything tangentially related to your startup while you are working on HS. I wrote and open-sourced a library that was tangentially related to my startup, but I did it as a learning experience; it wasn't mission-critical, it just scratched an itch. I wound up not using the project on my startup because it contacted an API that changed, which crushed my curiosity and caused me to stop working on it, but looming in the back of my head, it gave me some inspiration for the curiosity that HS satisfies. In hindsight, I wish I had never written that library. Yes I learned from it, but my time would probably have been better spent reading Erlang and OTP in Action.
- ryanfitz 15y ago
  Me saying "mock startup" was probably a bad term to use, plus I'm probably missing the use case of hacker school. What I really meant was to work on something larger scale as a team. For an example make a clone of hn or reddit, do a web app and mobile, maybe even build multiple versions in different languages. From Dave and Nick's reply it sounds like they tried something along those lines, but learned that people got a lot more value out of working on a number of various smaller sized projects, which is great.
  - zemo 15y ago
    clone of hn or reddit ah ok, I understand. Yes, that's totally something we would do. Cloning, rewriting in a new language, or forking would be appropriate. It wouldn't make much sense to clone Reddit because it's already open source, but forking it and modifying it would be very appropriate. We wrote four chat servers reminiscent of chat.nodejs.org in batch[1]; one with Brubeck (python), one with Chicago Boss (erlang), one with node.js, and then the Brubeck chat program was rewritten to work inside of a Spotify App, so yes we clone existing projects. But typically with a project like that, there's a lot of cool stuff in the beginning and you eschew some more tedious aspects that you would need for a real-world project, like, say... IE compatibility. Once you're housekeeping and your new work doesn't teach you much and doesn't give you cool things to show the rest of the group, it gets really boring really fast, and the environment naturally encourages you to do something more dynamic.
  - zemo 15y ago
    to work on something larger scale as a team oh right, I left this out: we had a period in batch[1] where we all did team work. A number of Hacker Schoolers contributed to the async Python web framework, Brubeck (http://brubeck.io/ http://brubeck.io/), which was a batch[0] project. Perhaps batch[2] will contribute a bit to it, too.

davidbalbert 15y ago

We have made an effort to make sure that Hacker School is not about startups and products. This is mostly from experience in prior batches: students who worked on producty or startupy ideas didn't get nearly as much out of the batch as students who were working on more technical stuff. Also, in NYC specifically, we feel that there isn't as much of a pure "hacker" scene. It's too intermingled with the startup world. We're trying to do our part to fix that.

nicholasjbs 15y ago

To expand on Dave's comment above a bit: While we're very much not about launching startups or products, we already do much of what you suggest. We encourage people to write useful code and build or contribute to open source projects. Hacker Schoolers frequently collaborate and pair. Everyone puts their code on Github. We emphasize code quality and writing clean, maintainable code you're proud of.

zemo 15y ago

I was in batch[1] and worked on the back end of a startup simultaneously, but not while on HS time. Having had the experience, I wouldn't recommend HS if you're more interested in startups than you are in programming. The goals are completely different. The measure of a startup's success can be directly observed, but you can't simply observe an overwhelming sense of curiosity or the triumphal sense of discovery. The reason I'm interested in startups is that it's a way to spend all of your time creating things that enrich other people's lives, which is exactly what we try to do at HS. Then you have the concept of ownership and monetary gain, but nobody really owns HS projects, they just happen. There are no contracts or points, there is only the joy of programming. When you naturally put people together that are all working to better themselves in the same way, they wind up cooperating. It's much easier to cooperate on something that's already shared. Now that's not to say that you can't do anything tangentially related to your startup while you are working on HS. I wrote and open-sourced a library that was tangentially related to my startup, but I did it as a learning experience; it wasn't mission-critical, it just scratched an itch. I wound up not using the project on my startup because it contacted an API that changed, which crushed my curiosity and caused me to stop working on it, but looming in the back of my head, it gave me some inspiration for the curiosity that HS satisfies. In hindsight, I wish I had never written that library. Yes I learned from it, but my time would probably have been better spent reading Erlang and OTP in Action.

ryanfitz 15y ago
Me saying "mock startup" was probably a bad term to use, plus I'm probably missing the use case of hacker school. What I really meant was to work on something larger scale as a team. For an example make a clone of hn or reddit, do a web app and mobile, maybe even build multiple versions in different languages. From Dave and Nick's reply it sounds like they tried something along those lines, but learned that people got a lot more value out of working on a number of various smaller sized projects, which is great.
- zemo 15y ago
  clone of hn or reddit ah ok, I understand. Yes, that's totally something we would do. Cloning, rewriting in a new language, or forking would be appropriate. It wouldn't make much sense to clone Reddit because it's already open source, but forking it and modifying it would be very appropriate. We wrote four chat servers reminiscent of chat.nodejs.org in batch[1]; one with Brubeck (python), one with Chicago Boss (erlang), one with node.js, and then the Brubeck chat program was rewritten to work inside of a Spotify App, so yes we clone existing projects. But typically with a project like that, there's a lot of cool stuff in the beginning and you eschew some more tedious aspects that you would need for a real-world project, like, say... IE compatibility. Once you're housekeeping and your new work doesn't teach you much and doesn't give you cool things to show the rest of the group, it gets really boring really fast, and the environment naturally encourages you to do something more dynamic.
- zemo 15y ago
  to work on something larger scale as a team oh right, I left this out: we had a period in batch[1] where we all did team work. A number of Hacker Schoolers contributed to the async Python web framework, Brubeck (http://brubeck.io/ http://brubeck.io/), which was a batch[0] project. Perhaps batch[2] will contribute a bit to it, too.