HN Academy

Are we sure it was discontinued? It is still listed on Udacity[0] and another course titled "Intro to Backend"[1].

I enjoyed that course by the way.

[0]: https://eu.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253 [1]: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-backend--ud171

⬐ didgeoridoo

There it is! Thanks for finding — somehow all my Googling ended up on Udacity 404 pages...

https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253

Yikes! I shared the course directly from the udacity app. Looks like I got the wrong link.

https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253

That should take you to the right one hopefully. It's basically Steve Huffman's course on how to build a blog. :)

⬐ Taylor_OD

Great! Thank you!

Udacity's CS253 "Web Development"[0] taught by Steve Huffman does exactly that. It uses Python on Google App Engine and Jinja for templating.

It starts from the basics. Tackles forms, handling requests and parameters. Cookie handling and authentication. Hashing (on which he even shares a bit of Reddit history: they didn't hash passwords which allowed them to detect spam accounts using the same password, but then Murphy's Law hit and the laptop was stolen and the database with it). Indices, joins, etc..

He discusses Reddit's architecture evolution and why they made the choices they've made given the context, etc. Sometimes, it boils down to "we chose it because that's what we knew". Other times, "we chose it because we hated the other thing". It's fun to hear him talk about this.

The course is pretty cool and the subtitle "How to Build a Blog" is an understatement. There was no stress on writing beautiful code or something, but the message is clear.

Another course I'm looking into is Stanford's Startup Engineering CS184 by Balaji S. Srinivasan and Vijay S. Pande. It has been discontinued. I just did a flyby and it's pretty much what you're talking about (they do both "big picture" with their reading list (Thiel, Graham, Andreessen, etc) but don't shy away from getting down to "viewport" and CSS, setting up stuff on Heroku, talking about tmux. They apparently did a lot of "why" stuff).

In my opinion, much of learning is done as it would be in a physical system with non catastrophic consequences: doing stuff, analyzing phenomena by the changed quantities and state/side effects, deducing the governing laws. You learn much about CSS from inspecting elements and changing stuff then reading MDN, than from the opposite. The first gives you something to anchor new knowledge to as opposed to starting with a setting that is too formal and abstract..

I mean, even doing Physics one can't be so exact not to approximate and neglect the influence of something at some point and just do a basic thought/physical experiment.

[0]: https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253

Just wondering why you choose PHP without mentioning JavaScript? There are many free course:

https://www.edx.org/xseries/html5-w3c

https://www.eduonix.com/courses/Web-Development/learn-object...

https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253

https://www.codecademy.com/learn/php

⬐ alexhakawy

I've been checking out that first link you gave me is it worth it? I'm half way through it but no JS stuff yet.

Peter Norvig's "Design of Computer Programs"

https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

An introduction to some semi-advanced programming concepts using an accessible language like Python, taught by a giant of CS.

Steve Huffman's "Web Development"

https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253

Basics of developing a web application, it uses Google App Engine as a base but the concepts taught are easily extensible to other platforms. Steve comes off as a likable and competent teacher.

Agreed with it basically being lots of hard work, and that you have to be very motivated.

I'm currently 29, working as a Software Developer, and also started late. Got my MSc in Oceanography, had some basic programming experience (built basic websites for beer money, some light scientific programming), but not much. Decided I liked the analytics more than the rest of science, and got a job at a SaaS company as a Data Analyst. Really started falling in love with programming quickly there, and did the following: - took online courses like crazy (often waking up early to get some in before work, and more on evenings/weekends when possible) - always took on the most technical tasks at work, where I'd get to write as much Python/R/SQL as possible - started a coding club at work, great for group learning and motivation

After ~2 years of this I had gotten myself to a point where I could legitimately work as a Software Developer, and got a new job as one (at the same company). Stayed in my area of expertise, data science/analytics, but as a developer instead of an analyst.

I wouldn't suggest codeacademy, though. Maybe it's changed since I tried it, but my experience was that they introduced you to a bunch of syntax, but left out most of the fundamentals of how computer science and how to structure programs. I'd much more strongly suggest taking more involved courses. Some of my favourites include (note - bias towards Python, Scala and SQL courses, as that's what I happen to use a lot of):

Intro to Comp Sci (Python) https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-computer-science--cs...

Intro to Web Dev (Python) https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253

Data Structures and Algos (Python): http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/pythonds/index...

JS intro: http://eloquentjavascript.net/

Functional programming (Scala): https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

Reactive programming (Scala): https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive

Good databases courses (boring but good content): https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/abou...

My personal feeling is that things like codeacademy get you superficial knowledge, like learning to use tools, when what you really want is deeper knowledge about how to build houses, regardless of the tools.