I am hungry and itching for my first immersive class with Momentum to start. We have a great program put together that is going to change people’s careers and their lives. One of the pieces of the program I’m most excited about is called “Development Practices.”
In putting together our new curriculum, I spent a lot of time thinking about what’s missing from code school curricula. I realized that in the past, I’ve taught people to code, but the harder part is teaching them to be developers.
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A lot of people learning to code are doing so in their spare time. If you work in a company that needs developers and are trying to teach yourself to code, your employer might be your best ally.
When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a teacher. I didn’t think I’d end up teaching people to code. I wanted to be a high school English teacher. I learned to program, though, and that career was too lucrative to derail. Fortunately, I found my way back to teaching, first through being an instructor and academic director at The Iron Yard, and now through co-founding Momentum.
I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.
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One of the most fun and unexpected parts of hopping on the Jesus train has been finding podcasts. Here are my favorites:
Unbelievable? This is the most serious podcast I listen to. The host, Justin, brings people with different perspectives together, often a Christian and an atheist, but not exclusively, and has them debate about a topic. It is British, so it is very civilized. I often find myself agreeing with the non-believer in the episode, but it’s all very kind.
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I had a goal this year of reading 52 books, which was overly ambitious – I only read 31. I’m glad I made the plan, though, because it made me keep a list, which I’ve never done before.
I have spent some time recently building bots for Slack using Glitch, and it is one of the most fun experiences I have had writing code.
If you haven’t used Glitch before, it’s an online code editor for Node.js that automatically saves and restarts your application on edit and hooks it up to a domain. Using this, you can iterate on your application quickly. When developing a bot for Slack, you can pop back and forth between Glitch and Slack and see changes in real time.
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