8 Codecademy Alternatives That Will Get You Where You Need to Go
Apr 26, 2022 by Zulie Rane
Just last month, Codecademy was sold to Skillsoft for $525 million. Not too shabby, and entirely well-deserved if you ask me. I’ll be straight with you, I love Codecademy. Maybe you’re wondering why I’m opening with that in an article about its alternatives, but I want to start with the history so you can really grasp what Codecademy alternatives are good for. Codecademy was launched in 2011 by a Columbia dropout and his Columbia non-dropout friend, it was one of the very first online learning platforms for coding.
Top 10 Best Communities For Learning to Code
Apr 20, 2022 by Zulie Rane
Where to look for project inspiration, answers to specific questions, or support for your learning journey The one thing that every programmer has in common, whether you’ve only ever implemented a “Hello World” program or you’re a senior software engineer, is the need to continuously learn. New technologies, programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and conventions are constantly being introduced to the industry. As a beginner, it can be hard to suss out what you need to know to enter the profession, and once you’re a proficient coder, it’s tiring to constantly investigate trending topics in tech.
An Overview of Boot.dev’s Full-Stack Architecture
Jan 10, 2022 by Lane Wagner
Because I’ve had several inquiries on this topic, I thought it would be interesting to publish some information on how the boot.dev website and platform work, and how I’ve organized all the technologies I’m using. I’ll do my best to keep this list updated in the future as I migrate from older tools and technologies to newer ones, but assume that this might be a bit out of date by the time you read it.
The Best Product Managers Have The Worst Ideas
Nov 02, 2021 by Lane Wagner
It’s hard finding good product people. That fact is really a tragedy because they are probably the most important part of any product-focused organization. I think there is a misconception in the software industry that product managers have a good sense of “what users want”, “what the next feature should be” or “ux design”. In reality, I’ve come to believe that the best product managers aren’t good at any of that, and they know it.
Well, We Might Have a Video Call for That!
Sep 27, 2021 by Lane Wagner
This article contains some of my thoughts on communications for distributed teams and is a response to No, we won’t have a video call for that! by Florian Hass. Read his article first if you haven’t yet, he makes some great points! I really enjoyed Florian’s article, and while we agree on a lot of things, like Scrum being a bad idea, I found some key points I disagree with. Let’s start with the disagreements, because they tend to be more interesting, and then I’ll follow up by emphasizing some of his ideas I agree with.
16 Great Coding Challenges You Can Try Out
Jun 24, 2021 by Zulie Rane
Coding challenges are a fun way to improve your coding quickly. When I started to learn coding in school, coding challenges were the furthest thing from my mind. In fact, I was struck with one particular issue: I didn’t really want to learn to code. I didn’t care enough about coding. I didn’t care about the language. I wanted to get a decent grade and get out. Like a lot of other coders, I’m competitive by nature, but only when it suits me.
The 10x Meeting - Solving for Too Many Meetings
May 10, 2021 by Lane Wagner
Perhaps you’ve heard of the fabled 10x developer (or 10x engineer) - the one on the team that’s 10x as productive as their average colleague. While many, including myself, doubt the existence of such people, I do think there are meetings that are 10x as productive as the average meeting. My goal in this article is to break down their properties so we can have 10x fewer meetings. What’s the purpose of a meeting?
How I Organize My Local Development Environment
Mar 17, 2021 by Lane Wagner
When I was just getting into coding, I was very disorganized. I would create a new text file in My Documents, work on it, never create a Git repository, accidentally delete it later, you get the idea. Nowadays I’m quite the opposite. To be honest, the thing that made me get my act together was the quite unpopular and now deprecated GOPATH that early versions of Go required developers to work in.
The Benefits of Gamified Learning
Jan 20, 2021 by Lane Wagner
Why was that adjustment to college classes so hard? Sitting through hours of lectures and PowerPoints can be challenging for even the most dedicated students. When it comes to online learning, many options are structured similarly. The main difference between college and online courses is that with online platforms you’re watching a recorded lecture which results in even less student interaction. We need a way to involve and motivate students. Gamified learning is the answer.
Building an NLP Engine Is Hard, but Not as Hard as Defining Terms
Jan 19, 2021 by Lane Wagner
In my full-time role at Nuvi, I’ve been lucky enough to work on a team where we’re able to push the boundaries in the natural language processing field. We built out several different “facets” that we score text on, including sentiment, emotion, vulgarity, tense, and currently, we’re working on promotion detection. While the technical side of NLP is hard, one of the hardest things was unexpected - defining the boundaries between the categories in question.