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Pretty good curriculum, I’m not sold on MongoDB, I’d prefer someone with Postgres or SQLite experience so they can be immediately useful on a project, but it’s

Pretty good curriculum, I’m not sold on MongoDB, I’d prefer someone with Postgres or SQLite experience so they can be immediately useful on a project, but it’s better than nothing, which would be even worse. There’s a rather deep rabbit hole really about figuring out what the best beginner curriculum should look like, because if the diversity of the applicability of Python. They might be doing to a data science role, a sysadmin role, an infosec role, an educational role, you just never know. I think it’d be prohibitively difficult to unify these tracks, and might even play a role in the perceived difficulty for a lot of people coming to computer work from zero programming experience. Someday, I’d like to see some sort of AI platform that can gauge a users intuition about the concepts on the whiteboard and tailor lessons to be impressed upon that user the best way. I’d teach a 30yo with ten years of Excel munging experience different than I’d teach a 20yo with no CS education at all besides video games. That could be automated to great benefit, imo.

nerdponx 4y ago
Another -1 for MongoDB here. It's a newbie trap in general. However is is probably easier to get started with for someone who is already learning Python, because its data structures closely resemble Python data structures, the query language can be expressed directly in Python object literals. This makes MongoDB a very gentle introduction the basic usage of databases for storing data (as opposed to e.g. dumping JSON to a file). Starting with Mongo might make it easier to graduate to relational databases & SQL later. Arguably TinyDB might be a better choice than MongoDB, but at least Mongo does get used in industry once in a while.
rekahrv 4y ago
> There’s a rather deep rabbit hole really about figuring out what the best beginner curriculum should look like, because if the diversity of the applicability of Python. So true. I really like that 1 day is devoted to: * PyPI * virtual environments Those feel super useful in all the roles you've listed. I'm also not convinced that MongoDB is the most practical choice. On the other hand, it might be more intuitive to learn on 1 day than the relational database modelling. (Especially if we assume that the student has already learned about various data structures during week 1.)
rekahrv 4y ago
> Someday, I’d like to see some sort of AI platform that can gauge a users intuition about the concepts on the whiteboard and tailor lessons to be impressed upon that user the best way. I’d teach a 30yo with ten years of Excel munging experience different than I’d teach a 20yo with no CS education at all besides video games. That could be automated to great benefit, imo. That's an intriguing idea!!

nerdponx 4y ago

Another -1 for MongoDB here. It's a newbie trap in general. However is is probably easier to get started with for someone who is already learning Python, because its data structures closely resemble Python data structures, the query language can be expressed directly in Python object literals. This makes MongoDB a very gentle introduction the basic usage of databases for storing data (as opposed to e.g. dumping JSON to a file). Starting with Mongo might make it easier to graduate to relational databases & SQL later. Arguably TinyDB might be a better choice than MongoDB, but at least Mongo does get used in industry once in a while.

rekahrv 4y ago

> There’s a rather deep rabbit hole really about figuring out what the best beginner curriculum should look like, because if the diversity of the applicability of Python. So true. I really like that 1 day is devoted to: * PyPI * virtual environments Those feel super useful in all the roles you've listed. I'm also not convinced that MongoDB is the most practical choice. On the other hand, it might be more intuitive to learn on 1 day than the relational database modelling. (Especially if we assume that the student has already learned about various data structures during week 1.)

rekahrv 4y ago

> Someday, I’d like to see some sort of AI platform that can gauge a users intuition about the concepts on the whiteboard and tailor lessons to be impressed upon that user the best way. I’d teach a 30yo with ten years of Excel munging experience different than I’d teach a 20yo with no CS education at all besides video games. That could be automated to great benefit, imo. That's an intriguing idea!!