Ask HN: Programming lessons for non-programmers?

#1

Post by lukas » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 12:18 AM UTC

Many non-programmers at my company (CrowdFlower) are interested in learning how to code. We've tried having the engineers run lessons with some success, but I think it might work better to use a standardized curriculum.

Some of the online courses seem a little too html and javascript intensive. We do some of that but what would be immediately useful to everyone is more scripting and basic SQL and data mining skills. Can anyone recommend some online resources?

Has anyone tried to this type of thing at their company and can they suggest any learnings or best practices? I'm thinking of offering a bonus to employees who hit some milestone - any suggestion for some goal that might be reasonable?

Re: Ask HN: Programming lessons for non-programmers?

#2

Post by hoodoof » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 3:31 AM UTC

You need a real project to learn how to program. Anything else does not give the motivation to break through the problems and learn what is needed to get stuff built.

Re: Ask HN: Programming lessons for non-programmers?

#3

Post by tommaxwelll » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 5:47 AM UTC

hoodoof wrote: post #2

You need a real project to learn how to program. Anything else does not give the motivation to break through the problems and learn what is needed to get stuff built.

I can attest to this. I tried to learn programming MULTIPLE times, giving up each time within days. Recently I was sitting on an idea for a web startup, and when I say "sitting," I mean sitting on it for 6+ months.

Story short, I threw my hands up and tried to learn programming again. It's only been about a month, but it's been fun so far and it's a month longer than I had tried in the past.

Re: Ask HN: Programming lessons for non-programmers?

#4

Post by slykat » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 8:44 PM UTC

I've had a great experience with Udacity. As a bit of a background, I was an EE in undegrad so I took a few CS courses but I've barely done any coding professionally so I needed to "re-learn" programming. I like Udacity because most of the course work is in Python (good for most types of development), the lectures only go a few minutes before you are quizzed on knowledge (active learning), the course is self paced, and you build on a mini-project across the course (building the blocks of a search engine).

I definitely agree with @hoodoof that a project is essential. At the tail end of the CS 101 I got a bit bored but had a side project I was working on as well. I ended up focusing more time on the side project since it was more fun and challenging, but Udacity helped build some fundamentals and jump start the learning. I'd try combining an online course like Python and mini projects (maybe small data analysis projects at Crowdflower or mini web tools).

Also, as a suggestion, I'd suggest considering web side projects even if you don't use it at Crowdflower. There's something incredibly exciting about deploying a tool for people to publicly see on the web that makes programming stick for newbies (at least me). Once you build the motivation, you can assign side projects that are more useful for the company.

I used to work for the big G where they had a few programs to learn to code (but it never worked for me) - let me know if you want to know why they didn't work.