Parul is passionate about the potential of open learning - co-founding Springboard (www.springboard.com) is her way to contribute to the movement. In the past, she has worked at Ittiam systems and IBM Research on problems spanning wireless communication systems, cloud computing, green technologies and analytics. She is a Senior member of IEEE and ACM, and has coauthored 12 publications and 8 patents. She is a recipient of MIT Technology Review India's Top Innovators under 35 award, IIT Bombay Distinguished Service Award and the Foundation of Youth Social Entrepreneurship’s fellowship for 100 changemakers under 30yrs in the Asia-Pacific region. Parul has Bachelors and Masters degrees from IIT Bombay and UCLA respectively.
I would definitely expect a senior manager in a tech company to know that! Keeping an eye on trends, competitors, influencers, big shakeups is a must for doing their job.
We are a 3 year old startup and have had product/marketing/ops in San Francisco and engineering in Bangalore all this while. We use Google Docs power users and spontaneous communication happens through Slack and calls. Between these, most of our knowledge sharing needs are covered. Though as the team grows, Slack is becoming too noisy making it easy to miss messages, so we are rethinking that a bit.
Part of a VC's job is advertisement (for their portfolio companies) ;-) However, in this case I couldn't find a past association between Flatiron school & Fred Wilson and/or Union Square ventures, so this article seems to be expressing genuine appreciation for the model. Maybe he likes them so much that he will invest in them in the next round :D
To understand the cost of education argument, notice the catch lies here: "teaching students skills that are directly related to job requirements." How much time of a traditional 4 year college is spent on skills that a grad would actually need or use? A lot of it is just archaic legacy. If you take those out, then the cost of education might actually compare favorably for bootcamps.
An additional (or alternate perspective) is that bootcamps are a supplement to, rather than a replacement for traditional education. Bootcamps teach hard job skills, whereas college teaches soft & social skills. Either way, they are a welcome addition!
You are right, @Wuliwong. Our learning paths ("tutorials" comprised of online courses, videos, blog posts etc) are free, and experts help curate them for the joy of sharing their knowledge and giving back to the community. We are working on paid online programs, where learners get 1-1 mentorship and greater engagement with experts and the student community. (ps: I am one of the founders of SlideRule)
Seems like "Design of Everyday Things" is a really short course, with only 3 Chapters and each video of 1-2 minutes. The total video lecture time for the entire course could well be ~1 hour. The project (timebank) is what will take more time and the estimate for that in Section 3.3 is 8 hours.
On the contrary, we have had a great experience with remote working teams. We are a young startup, and we started out wanting to hire the best local folks (that is clearly preferred, if you can do that in a reasonable time). But that was taking a lot of time and/or money (both we couldn't afford to lose much of), and we started working with remote team-members on fixed-term assignments - they got us started quick. After working with them for several months, I can say they are contributions have been invaluable. I'd happily hire them as full-time remote workers. The key, of course, is to find people who are good with the extra communication that remote working typically needs.
Hey, sorry about that! Could you please try again and see if the error persists? If it does, please send me an email with your work setup & flow details at parul@mysliderule.com
Hi Steve, I'm the author of the path and a big fan of your course - thanks so much for putting it together! However I would like to echo @rattray's point - when I started learning as a complete newbie to web-dev, I found Django much easier to pick up, less intimidating and more satisfying than Webapp2. The Udemy course I have included later teaches how to put up a simple landing page using Django/bootstrap and in 3-4 hours - you have tried frontend, backend and all. The joy of making something real, even if simple is a big motivator and confidence-booster, which IMO is key to self-learning. I actually started with your course, drifted away in the middle, and then came back after finishing the Django course.
I strongly think so. Even as someone who had used version control before (CVS), I found Git fairly intimidating in the beginning. I feared it much till I fell in love with it. Further, it is hard to make someone appreciate the need for version control without getting them to write enough code first.
Not necessarily.. depends on your choice of browser. I prefer Chrome, but I know a lot of web-devs, esp those are on Linux or those who have been coding from pre-Chrome days, prefer FF/Firebug. Also, when developing for compatibility with multiple OS/browsers - you sometimes end up using many. Ee have even used "IE DevTools" to debug some of the IE specific issues :-)
AI path added to the "To-Do" :-) Currently, one way to include courses you have taken to your "binder" would be to review them on our site and mark their enrolled/completed/dropped status in the form. We give users a dashboard where they can see all courses completed/enrolled in or added to watchlist. You will help a lot of learners by sharing your reviews too :-) Thanks much!
My apologies if you found that disorienting! You are right that CS101 becomes a prerequisite for CS253 (if you don't know python already). The reason I started with CS253 is because, personally for me, it helped a lot to know the top level concepts of "How web works" and the front-end (because that is what a normal user sees) and then go into concepts of server side languages which might seem too involved and dry to a beginner.
You are right, Nick. Rails is more mature in the number of resources available and its dev-community. But increasingly around me, I see more people starting to build on python. I have seen tons of learning material and bootcamps on RoR but not even a fraction of that on Python/Django . That was one of the reasons we thought that documenting our learning would be useful!
I think "Ruby outshines Python" is a matter of great debate, and I wouldn't say that one is universally better than the other, rather it depends on your application and personal preferences! I am the author of the path, and before we started building SlideRule, we evaluated Django/Python vs Ruby/Rails briefly .. I am a big fan of python, so the choice was obvious for me :-)
That said, this is just one web-dev path and doesn't in any way claim that Python is superior to the alternatives. There can be so many more - on RoR, Node or even more recent ones like scala .. hope experts will help us build those. If you are interested, please write to us at contact@mysliderule.com!
Great. What will be the format of this course? We run an online course discovery platform called http://mysliderule.com and what we have seen from users' browsing behavior is that learners typically prefer courses with video lectures, and codecademy/udacity style interactive in-browser exercises if possible. Also consider hosting your course on marketplaces like Udemy and Skillshare too .. they have a very vibrant community and can be an easy source of user-acquisition for you
A bit of inspiration can do wonders :) However, I was hoping that the red and green .com indicators would tell me whether the domain is available or not. Didn't find that information accurate.