Tag Archives: learning

College was my biggest mis­take:

$44,000 might as well have been a mil­lion dol­lars, because in my mind they were equally unfath­omable– with only $300 in my check­ing account, I had to make a deci­sion whether or not to bor­row $176,000. Makes sense.

I remem­ber fac­ing a sim­i­lar deci­sion at 18. I with­drew the $6,000 from my sav­ings account and wrote a $5,000 check to Whitman.

The other grand bought me a MacBook. On that MacBook I taught myself basic HTML, CSS, PHP, and even­tu­ally dis­cov­ered WordPress.

I wouldn’t say my time at col­lege was a mis­take. Too much good came out of it to say that. But, I do know what the more pro­duc­tive use of my time and money was.

Learnable Programming:

a well-designed sys­tem is not sim­ply a bag of fea­tures. A good sys­tem is designed to encour­age par­tic­u­lar ways of think­ing, with all fea­tures care­fully and cohe­sively designed around that purpose.

This essay will present many fea­tures! The trick is to see through them — to see the under­ly­ing design prin­ci­ples that they rep­re­sent, and under­stand how these prin­ci­ples enable the pro­gram­mer to think.

Professors with­out bor­ders. Interesting overview of mass, dis­trib­uted, web-based teach­ing tools. Things like Coursera and Udacity are neat but they’re really just an alpha. They take the same model of edu­ca­tion as tra­di­tional col­leges and shift it online. The rev­o­lu­tion will come when some­one sets the goal of build­ing a web-native tool for learn­ing. Then it will get interesting.

Treehouse. A fas­ci­nat­ing new startup from Ryan Carson. It seeks to teach the basics of web design, devel­op­ment, or iOS pro­gram­ming to any­one. The videos look really well done and there’s quizzes at the end of each ses­sion. I plan on sign­ing up this week­end and see­ing how things go.