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I like these "learn to code" websites, it helps to get new people familiar with the topic. But do we really have a need for so many of them? When I learned web

I like these "learn to code" websites, it helps to get new people familiar with the topic. But do we really have a need for so many of them? When I learned web development I googled "<technology name here> tutorial" and it was enough 99% of the time. This plus knowing the mozilla website for reference + stackoverflow covers 99% of what I ever wanted to learn regarding web standards. SQL perhaps is something that needs a bit more structured learning, but still any "sql tutorial" search will get you probably a good foundation of SQL. Is there a real shortage of web developers out there? I'm not so sure. Perhaps there is a shortage of GOOD web developers out there. And I doubt that a good future web developer will learn better from a dedicated course rather than reading the rails tutorial / or watch rails casts on their own. I mean, learning to learn and finding information by yourself (for me as a hiring manager) is much more important than what you currently know. I'm interested in what you could potentially do, not what you already did. And if you know what you already know by researching on your own and building your own curriculum then I might be a bit more impressed (although probably I shouldn't be) - just because this is how I learned web development. By building things, and Googling things. By stackoverflow, MDN, and yes also w3schools. By reading the HTML spec, by reading ECMAScript language specification, by taking academic RDBMS theory course as part of my undergrad degree. I might be completely wrong, but I would need a lot of good faith to believe that with an online self contained crash course someone is able to become a fully qualified web developer without doing some leg work. In other words a really good web development course in my opinion is a bad one. It makes it too easy on a new developer, making them think that all the information will be available for them and every task is broken down into small edible pieces. I want people to know what it is to be challenged with a question they don't know and research.

eriktrautman 13y ago
You make good points about the need to develop skills for finding information and learning on your own. I do think, though, that there's a lot of value in increasing the visibility of that information to increase the efficiency with which that information can be accessed -- think how Google and Stack Overflow have changed the productivity of programmers. Having a good set of resources laid out for me certainly doesn't take away from the fact that I've still got to learn them but it does prevent me from wasting time with inferior ones. There's also value in producing and marshaling those resources because there will always be a set of people who might have been great developers but never really entered the learning funnel because they didn't have access to good resources at the time when they were ripe to explore them. In terms of ease of learning, sites like codecademy make it extremely easy to get started but you're certainly not going to be able to learn an employable skillset by working solely in a hand-holding browser environment. That's why I've tried to focus on building real (and often difficult) projects along the way in this curriculum. Start to finish, it will likely take ~1000 hours to complete. I guess my points are that A) development will (and should) require a certain degree of actual effort to learn because that's how you develop problem solving skills but finding the right resources to do so shouldn't, and, B) making those resources more accessible helps more people potentially great find their way to the profession.

eriktrautman 13y ago

You make good points about the need to develop skills for finding information and learning on your own. I do think, though, that there's a lot of value in increasing the visibility of that information to increase the efficiency with which that information can be accessed -- think how Google and Stack Overflow have changed the productivity of programmers. Having a good set of resources laid out for me certainly doesn't take away from the fact that I've still got to learn them but it does prevent me from wasting time with inferior ones. There's also value in producing and marshaling those resources because there will always be a set of people who might have been great developers but never really entered the learning funnel because they didn't have access to good resources at the time when they were ripe to explore them. In terms of ease of learning, sites like codecademy make it extremely easy to get started but you're certainly not going to be able to learn an employable skillset by working solely in a hand-holding browser environment. That's why I've tried to focus on building real (and often difficult) projects along the way in this curriculum. Start to finish, it will likely take ~1000 hours to complete. I guess my points are that A) development will (and should) require a certain degree of actual effort to learn because that's how you develop problem solving skills but finding the right resources to do so shouldn't, and, B) making those resources more accessible helps more people potentially great find their way to the profession.