Udacity launches new "class" feature Career Advisor Program forStudents who study programming online

Udacity new feature Career Advisory Program report, review, and offering walkthrough.Udacity announces new programming initiative - a career advisory service for online students seeking a job as a Front-End Web Developer, Full Stack Web Developer, iOS developer, android developer, and data analyst (basically all of its nano degree tracks. Think of this service as a derivative of the growth and expansion of Udacity nanodegree programs. With the hefty price tag of those programs, paying customers demand better job placements upon graduation). 

Services

What's Included

A direct connection to our hiring partners with your Udacity profile Interview practice and resources Expert review of your personal brand (resume, LinkedIn and GitHub profiles) Training for cover letter writing and other important communications A free resume review during your free trial The meat of the offering is really Udacity's hiring partners programs As usual, Udacity boasts premium partners like Google (which is always on the list, given the founder Sebastian T's Google background). However, the real effectiveness of these programs and their placement rates are largely unknown. There's no objective 3rd party report of such numbers.  It is reported by Udacity itself that its hiring partners include Google,  AT&T, Microsoft, and Priceline. These are not the sexiest of Silicon Valley tech companies. However, they do hire a very large number of developers. May be newly minted developers should consider these larger and less sexy companies after all.  Udacity's career support is still limited. It seems to lean towards sending students out in into the internet to fend for themselves. Often you will find Udacity career service refer to external resources. Some of them are quite good, such as pramp, but keep in mind, within Udacity the opportunity is limited.

Codecademy Learn Java tutorial walkthrough 8 : Math +,-,*,/

In this exercise 8/12, Codecademy requires you to do some basic arithmetics using Java. Use the plus symbol + for addition, the minus symbol - for subtraction (it's a very short dash like the in the word "half-life"), the asterisk or the multiply symbol * for multiplication, the forward slash or the divide symbol / for division (the backward flash is \). 

In this case, you just have to multiply two whole numbers and store the result in a variable that can hold an integer. And that's exactly what line 4 does 

int myNumber = 5 * 6;

Don't forget the semicolon or ; at the end of the line. That's how Java knows a line has ended. Or else it will get confused when trying to execute line 4 and line 5 together and throw a nasty error message. This error message is Codecademy specific and can be confusing. If you included the semicolon correctly but still got this message check if you really multiply two integers and stored it successfully in a variable that int holds integers and the variable is called myNumber. 

The error message reads:

Did you multiply two integers?

Remember, integers are whole numbers only.

What's a whole number? 1, 3, 70, but not 3.5

Udacity Intro to Java Programming course lesson review and rating

Udacity offers intro to Java programming for free as a prerequisite for many of its classes, tracks and nano degrees such as Android Developer. It is a quick overview of the language, but it is not an in-depth introduction to the language. This course is mostly useful for begin or Udacity not so much for anyone else who is seriously getting started with Java.

The first few lessons are long but could have been much shorter. The setup and configuration for BlueJ and the algorithm introduction can be useful. Because of its video format, going through this course is quite time-consuming. As usual, Udacity's exercise is a well designed, real world of exercises, and some of them are quite tricky.

The class has an astounding 281K students.

Coursera Verified Signature Track Certification Takes WEEKS!

Update : I have finally gotten my certificates for both courses. The plus is that they can be shared on Linkedin. Courser certification is integrated perfectly with Linkedin Profiles. The minus is that the manually reviewed long winded Signature Track process took away the instant gratification of gamification and achievement. To finish the course, students must be disciplined at following step-by-step time-sensitive requirements of the course syllabus, making this process exactly the same as taking a college course, putting Coursera closer to "sharing college courses online" than "providing alternative and innovative education online". Udacity Nanodegree on the other hand, graded my highly individualized programming and coding assignments within a couple of hour thanks to its seamless Github integration. Github integration for submitting assignments is really a game changer.

An online learning junkie complains about the turtle speed of Coursera to stamp verified certificates from Signature Track. Coursera has innovated by adding some seriously awesome offerings (see last paragraph), but the certification process is off. Paying customers, suckers for gamified badges, online learning junkies like me are not getting the instant gratification of accomplishment and are prone to become massive dropouts, i.e. Coursera is doing good work but having no fun!

Just "finished" my first course on Coursera that is verified with Signature Track. Submitted all the assignments, I hope .. I won't know until later, because this "innovative" coursework still relies heavily on syllabus. You are on your own for keeping track of fragmented tasks (a few surveys, a few assignments, some multi-stage, peer-reviewed projects. There's no roadmap to showcase progress, nor instant gratification of completion. 

For people, who had trouble sticking to syllabus in college? Or didn't like the college studying style? Good luck. You are on your own. No wonder why MOOC's massive dropout rates or attrition is notorious too. Major media reports all covered this Massive Dropout Out Online phenomenon. 

Despite its innovative feel, the Coursera verification still relies heavily on manual verification that will take 2-3 weeks after the class hard deadline (meaning there's a long wait even after the class no longer accepts the late-beyond-imagination submissions). 

There's not much VIP treatment for those who become paid users, and that should be a big deal for all "startups" (FYI Coursera.com domain redirects to .org). There's quite a big of confusion for paid users, and there's no access to direct contact with any support staff (very different compared to Udacity - instant email replies). Coursera seems to focus on social support (Stanford research paper about MOOC dropout). While frustrated at the process, I was able to find fragments of answers in the forum, and even connect with someone who has completed those certificates before. He helped me understand that this may take weeks.

On his splashing Linkedin Profile, he proudly displays multiple signature track certificates from advanced and prestigious university courses! That was impressive. I instantly recognize him as a peer, despite that he's in Israel and I know nothing about the education system there. I also realized that there are people who finished some advanced classes I signed up for and consequently dropped out of in the past - guilt and shame creeps in. 

My two cents: those who buy expects premium services, so don't just offer a support page. Get more peer staff, community staff to hand hold students. Despite that I  graduated from a great university, I have learning obstacles (adult ADHD) and focus issues sticking to a text-heavy screen. This may be the case for many "students" seeking the likes of Coursera and Udacity out as learning alternatives.  When signup is massive and difficult to manage, peer evaluation helped, community-based peer support and Q&A FAQ will definitely help too. True story: a lot of us who don't have parents who went to ivy league elite colleges, struggle with one big thing when landed in an university like Stanford - I had no idea how to navigate and organize around the massive resources that are available. I didn't know how to manage my course load and catch up on materials for which everyone else attended two AP classes in the past. I didn't know how to track a syllabus and finish things on time. Plus, last but not least, if I am paying for a certificate with a brand name university / organization, yet no actual credention, to show off, I am a sucker for badges of gamification, and give me those badges ASAP for instant gratification! If I have great self-discipline for delayed gratification and self-regulation, I really won't be chipmonking and spazzled on the internet.

Final thought: I am finally discovering the beauty of Coursera this month. Until now, I never finished a course, nor paid for things, because the text-heavy interface seemed so boring for me who has adult ADHD. The fact that it offers some sort of verification, partners with name-brand universities (some even in China, very impressed), integrates with Linkedin to display your badges, and offers classes that are unique and impressive like a 101 on dinosaur, is something that deserves serious applause!

App nation 2013 recap and productivity apps

Productivity Apps
These are my personal opinions on productivity apps. Please critique make suggestions! Would love to hear from you.


Task Management Productivity
NEW~ Shoots&Leaves reviewed: could it be the developer friendly todo / task management that hackers always wanted? 

An app that I always wanted: turns a photo snapshot of the moment into a reminder / clipboard text / todos even markdowns! This is got to be a developer favorite. I am still testing it but wrote my review already, because the hacker friendliness
My review: One of my productivity finds. I always take picture info/task for myself but they easily get lost in the cameraroll. I like this app for allowing me to upload to imgur right away or to Dropbox if I want to be private. I don't think I have to give it permission to access my cameraroll, a privacy plus of course. Most fun of all it allows templating, a mustache like coder friendly syntax that allows dynamically forming texts: Read {{title}} by EOD {{url}} . Or even markdown! Win. Still testing 5 star for now, working and not crashing
The name seems to be spin of the popular yet humorous grammar, writing and etiquette book Eats, Shoots & Leaves (do you know what it means? ;-)
Wunderlist
Fast speed yet powerful todo list management with recurring task scheduling (a big productivity boost), categorization, star/favoriting, reminder and clock. Easy to use across all Mac and Apple mobile platforms. Drag and drop features.
Asana
For embodying agile development practice, task prioritization and management with easy drag and drop and also reprioritization / reordering. Keyboard smart, can reduce mouse clicking.
Logistics Productivity
Fancy Hands +Fancy Hands
I like Fancy Hands because it is a subscription plan for a number of fixed requests each month. Say I pay $25 dollars for a 5 request plan, making it a merely $5 dollars per request. It is incredible! The staff is US based, and English-speaking, which can be very helpful in certain geo-specific tasks and tasks that require cultural backgrounds like passion for the super bowl.  The most important part is that I don't have to hire by the hour, or negotiate the rate / quote for each task. If I have time for that logistics, I didn't have to get a virtual assistant help in the first place.

Fancy Hands review - affordable efficient virtual assistants
Career Productivity
Levo resume
A women friendly and aesthetically pleasing free resume builder tool made by a classy virtual community online +Levo League  that aims to promote women's career successes! It's enjoyable to use.

Levo League Resume Builder Phone App
Social Network Productivity
Using private social media networks like Path +Path
I use Path because it is intimate. I can tone down my sharing filter instead of worrying intensely about PR and impact. It auto shares (given permission) some of my social data like geolocation, sleep time, status and views, saves me time. It allows me to share contents like music and books, saves a lot of explanations.

Path -  a private social network
Coding Productivity
AirPair +Air Pair
I use AirPair to level up after attending code school and attending hackathons. It allows me to meet one-on-one with an expert and get a high quality session tailored to my needs. Will write a guest blog post on airpair about it soon! I can imagine AirPair is also good for developers learning new technologies but already are busy with projects at hand or have their billable hours filled up. This is a quick efficient to get started.

AirPair - pair programming and coding for developer productivity
Mental Storage and Information Management Productivity
Evernote (link to premium only, normal signup use evernote.com)
I use Evernote to manage my forever growing knowledge and skill notes. As I study more and more coding, trying to stay on top of business and marketing, I need memory and storage. Evernote is lightweight and works everywhere. I use the premium plan for massive uploads and OTC recognition - an effort to digitize all my documents to reduce cluster. Evernote was famously described as the external brain. We definitely need one in this information age.
Same Day Delivery Services if you value your time
Department store shopping like Toys R Us Lowe's  - eBay Now
Mini food catering and satisfying tapioca / boba or Philz coffee cravings  promo code fpt2 for $10 delivery credit.


Reading and information consumption productivity
Pocket
Easy to use mobile apps and webpage views, can archive and favorite, tag at ease. Light weight, fast yet powerful. Bonus: smart reading features like Recommended Reading, Long Read vs Short Read Classification
Financial Management Productivity
BillGuard
I'm still testing this one out but so far I like  it's lighter weight than minted, I can use Credit Cards only features. Swipe and fast archive, action, labeling features. Quickly check if bills are reasonable. Automated smart engine tells you if others have flagged a particular transaction.

From the news
Fast Company Recaps the best apps of 2013
Fast Company Work Smart section












x

Review: Web Development Bootcamp Hack Reactor Part 2: Myths - Rails + Curriculum + Interview + More

In my recent preview post, I highlighted some commonly asked questions about Hack Reactor :
Find the post here

The price tag? The venue? The instructors? The interview and selection process?

I explained part of the price tag in my Human Factor post and explained that the instructors at Hack Reactor are from prominent local startups and will have a great amount of time with students. Check it out, ask any questions you want.

In this post, I compiled some of the small surprises I have researched and found out about Hack Reactor during my onsite visit.

1. Hack Reactor : teaches Rails!
Hack Reactor does have Ruby and Ruby on Rails  sprints built in its curriculum. It actually makes an introduction to Ruby and RoR. Students will already have introductions to basic MVC frameworks in JavaScript before arriving at Rails. And they will do a lot of building block, basic scripting, and logic exercises with JavaScript (JavaScript being a less high level language, forces developers to be more detailed oriented. It's like building with lego pieces rather than sets of readily constructed lego buildings, as in Rails).

[Update - 12/24/2013] This section is pending further research, because the Rails sprint might be much shorter and lighter than I perceived in my visit. If you can help answer this question, please contact me.

2. Hack Reactor is full stack
Students learn full stack engineering skills. JavaScript is no longer just front end. And that's the big trend in the Silicon Valley. Front-end designers and engineers to be aware, this means the curriculum will be much harder than other regular HTML CSS JavaScript website building intensive classes, which mostly covers front end javascript, and sometimes without frameworks like Backbone.js

3. Hack Reactor interviews have gotten more intensive
The requirements have changed. Hack Reactor used to do one round interviews, but has since then improved its interview process to be more selective and has a technical component. Where students will need to get face time and work through exercises with instructors. In fact, this is the trend I am seeing in all bootcamps, App Academy being one of the first and harsher one.

4. Hack Reactor actually is similar in size as  Dev Bootcamp in its current venue, but the office is so well organized that it feels much bigger!
It's very clean and spacious, includes a clean accessible kitchen, and an open lecture area away from the desks. I was surprised how little space the instructors save for themselves besides a medium-small conference room and small tiniest offices. This makes plenty of instructors and staff sit outside the office, closer to students, i.e. more accessible. Only one set of bathrooms though.

5. The classes are small.
Maybe the price tag had made the camp  too "elite" to afford, but one benefit for the student is small class-size. And high teacher-student-ration. As mentioned in my Human Factor post, the student size max seems to linger at 25, but usually it is smaller, they even had 15-16 at one point. HR does not rule out the possibility of expanding with one more overlapping class of students.

6. Hack Reactor claims to have 100% hiring rate.

Being an Economics major, I am highly suspecting of stats. That being said, during my onsite visit, we exchanged anecdotes. Alumni are allowed to stay after the bootcamp until they find a job, and will get help. In fact, one extreme case has lasted for a while due to a combo of reasons, but the staff has supported him throughout the process, even threw him a party when he finally got hired. During the demo day that I visited, 50 companies are said to have signed up. I usually take a 30% deduction of no-show for Silicon Valley, especially Stanford events, that's still 35 companies. Which is much larger than Coding Dojo for example.

Students have been receiving salary as high as recently 110K, but that's more of an extreme case. Hack Reactor does not have the same level of confidence for its international students, citing Visa to always be a tough external factor.

While I am weary of all small-sample, business-driven numbers, upon checking out the students' projects (which I will feature and write about), they are obviously very skilled, look great, and very impressive, I would considered them way above what I have seen in other bootcamps. I will say more about this later on. The student projects make me believe that the claim seems to be somewhat valid.

During the day I also met students that have designed instagram display gallery views as a contractor/free lance (which they can work on as a part of the bootcamp, at times, Hack Reactor even help them find those positions), one guy who's going to study at MIT's prestige Media Lab, and seen the inhouse apps that HR has, curriculum platform, and student's reddit projects (which I will highlight later). The success of the bootcamp becomes convincing.

The bootcamp asks to be cc'ed in student application email at times, and will provide feedback on career communications in addition to offering interview prep. What impresses me the most is that, being so entrenched in the Silicon Valley, Hack Reactors' instructors have the direct experience of working at many prestigious Silicon Valley companies, making their "care" and advice much valuable than any Human Resource or Recruiter Correspondent at other bootcamps.

Update :  July 18: Hack Reactor isn't going public with their numbers yet, but the recent class cohort has a much higher average salary than previously stated on the website. Currently it says "some students" even get "six-figure salaries".  And the new result seems to make that more towards the norm. 

Read the previous section of this Review Collection

Review: Web Development Bootcamp Hack Reactor Part 1 - The Human Factor

The Human Factor Visualization

Students vs Staff, a sweet #

Does any one remember an old stat? Student-faculty-ratio? Time to think about that for our dear bootcamps, on which I have been writing about for the part year. As you know, Hack Reactor invited me for a day of unpaid research on-site.

This is a series of data-processing posts resolving mostly around qualitative data, that will eventually arrive at a video conclusion -  a review about Hack Reactor. 

And the first question that everyone asks: why is Hack Reactor so expensive? Last I checked early Feb? $12K, then $15K, now it is $17K and going at $18K. My posts must answer this question. Why? Readers are asking! And this is my hobby. My previous life as an Economist, pseudo, at Stanford hasn't faded, yet.

I was impressed!

I did arrive disappointed: yikes, demo day, INTERVIEW DAY! What is there to see but a show? I was ready to leave, yet I turned out to be super impressed...

It was interview day, few students have arrived at the normal hours - 9AM, may be 4? or 8 by 10AM. Yet the staff tables are filled. Though the most senior ones have yet arrived, there are at least 8 staff in front of their laptops. That's a lot of staff. Some setting up flowers, name tags for tables, cleaning up, and some just doing something at the screens ... the office space is beautiful, spacious, and very well organized.

I mentioned that to Tony, the founder, whose brother is the co-founder. The brother Marcus is a Twitter guy, and two other staff also has Twitter connection.  Tony casually confirmed that they make a huge commitment on the staff, but for me that was an understatement. After seeing other bootcamps, I realized immediately that the experience, stamina, and availabilities of staff here is unparalleled. Only Hackbright can attract a somewhat similar level of mentorship from real Silicon Valley programmers, because of the great cause and dedication of growing young female engineers. But mentorship and paid instructions aren't the same. 

Azat, another instructor, currently working at Storify is an experienced engineer who worked on mission critical features for the famous startup and also is an accomplished author Rapid Prototyping with JS.  Tony, himself is a self-made programmer, first in PHP, then Ruby and now JavaScript. He pointed out that Hack Reactor also houses authors of Angular JS, Marcus - internal training and rampup at Twitter.

The name brands of the instructors previous lives are staggering too: Walmart Labs, OKCupid Labs, Twitter, Adobe, Mozilla, Storify.  And Tony really deserves a separate post on his vision and management.

In this original Infographics - the Human Factor, I show the maximum number of students 25, surrounded by an estimate of staffs. 26 on payroll, that is 17 instructors 9 supporting staff! Wow!

These numbers will change, and now they are rough estimates. But surely enough, it was proportional to what I have seen even on the relatively quite demo day. Hiring real programmers with real legit Silicon Valley experiences, should definitely be a factor that sets Hack Reactor far apart from any existing Bootcamps, even the might Dev Bootcamp.

That being said, Tony has informed me that there was more than just staff. When he first answered my question about the price tag, it wasn't about staff yet. He has more to say. I shall cover that in my next post.

I know the staff is capable before I arrived. But what surprised me was the number - it is large. And the other WOW WOW factor: there's an inhouse online system that allows students to click on the office chart, indicate which table they are working at and that they need help. If the help they need isn't delivered right away, the screen will blink red, and just a few more minutes away, Tony's phone will ring! Wow.

Read the next related post : Part 2