Created: December 13, 2018 2:55 PM Tags: Thinkster Updated: December 13, 2018 5:23 PM
Initial email:
Hi Devon!
I really love that you offer this! I come from the world of elementary education. I spent years working with students with whatever technology was available and became frustrated with the lack thereof. As a result, I started making my own products and tools and that led me down the road of becoming more and more intrigued with web development. I decided to quit teaching after last year and go to a coding boot camp this past fall. However, it turned out to be a terrible experience. Amongst many other reasons, I felt very little support from my teachers and found that I made minimal progress. I’ve been taking a variety of online courses from Pluralsight, Udemy, and even egghead.io, but I always get most frustrated with simple set up of any projects I set out to start. I always seem to have issues with installing programs and getting things to run smoothly so I end up just reading courses without doing much coding. I really NEED more hands-on experience and would like to do so with some guided help. I would LOVE to work with you and to have a bit of “hand-holding” as I try to plunge more fully into development. Oh, and I should mention that I am familiar with Rails, some React, I’m studying Angular and TypeScript right now, and have also been looking into Cypress.io as well.
THANKS!!
My reply:
Hey, Brooke! Great to hear from someone else who is coming from an education background. Love your origin story. Getting development environments set up is really hard, especially when you’re starting out. I spend the free 30-minute session pulling back a little, taking a look at the big picture, and outlining some next steps, but I’d love to see if I can help you with any of the setup too.
Let’s get you scheduled for your free session.
https://calendly.com/raddevon/free-mentoring
I generally do all my free sessions on Thursdays. If that absolutely won’t work for you, let me know, and I’ll try to fit you in on another day.
Looking forward to talking to you, Brooke!
Her reply:
Hey Devon!
Thanks for the response! I’ll go schedule a time to meet with you right now. I think my issue with setting up environments is often just making silly mistakes like not being in the right directory. I get frustrated with these issues but I think the challenge I need the ABSOLUTE most help with is getting over this block of starting and making an application on my own. I’m really good at following tutorials or following a workbook but when it comes to making my own application, I don’t even know where to start. It’s taking everything I see in the videos I watch and trying to understand it all well enough to make my own app.
I’d really like to make an app that serves like an online learning platform. Something similar to Canvas/Instructure, if you’re familiar with them. I want to create an environment where I can make a course with modules and lessons and do that using Angular. Would that be something you could help me get started with? I’ll still go schedule a time on Thursday to meet. My main focuses right now are Angular and Cypress.io.
Thanks again! I’ll look forward to Thursday 🙂
My reply:
Those silly mistakes will evaporate as you do it more. Nothing to worry about. I know that may not be super comforting right now, but just keep building and you’ll get there in no time!
I’m not familiar with the learning platforms you mentioned, but I think I understand what you’re going for. I think I could help you get started with that. My only issue with that project is that it’s pretty large in scope. My approach would be to start by narrowing the scope pretty dramatically to something you can complete in a few weeks. You can then build the rest of the platform around that. I might also have a few questions for you to help understand what you want to achieve with it. Is it just a learning project? Could it be a product at some point? If so, who is the audience?
Start thinking about those things, and we can try to flesh that out a bit on Thursday. Talk to you soon, Brooke!
Her company just bought out Thinkster.io. Got her started with the Angular CLI. Told her the key for her is going to be getting out of tutorial purgatory and getting a real project shipped. We talked through the design of the project and what steps she would take to get started. She told me I should consider doing a course with her company.