Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?

My 10 year journey:

Ever since college, I had been teaching. Teaching and helping others keeps me humble, develops my patience, and makes me a better developer. I am constantly forced to follow best practices so I don't teach the wrong things.

2010 - I started coding as a junior in college. I was objectively the worst coder having started so late so I convinced my best friend at the time to learn how to code while he was pursuing an econ degree. This way, I know somebody worse than me at coding. It helped boost my confidence.

2012 - After graduation, I got a job! Shortly after, my best friend got a job too despite having only an econ degree and no coding background. This inspired my ex-girlfriend at the time (who had a stats degree) to learn how to code. She got a job shortly after.

2014 - I started thinking... could anyone get a coding job without a degree? I reached out to a high school friend who was working as an uber driver. His college degree didn't work out for him, so I invited him to stay in my home while he learned to code. I eventually hired him onto my team and we worked together for awhile.

2016 - I wanted a definitive answer to the question "could anyone get a coding job without a degree?". My hypothesis was a yes and to verify that and I needed more students. I made a public post offering a free coding bootcamp with no interviews. First 12 students got to join for free.

2018 - Teaching those students turned out to be really difficult because they all came from all different backgrounds. I had to change my curriculum many times to not only train them to become good software engineers, but also prepare them for interviews. Eventually, all the original students (2 of whom I hired myself) got a job as a software engineer. I invited new students and started drafting up a formal curriculum.

2019 - Wrapped up a first draft of our formal curriculum. Started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3

I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code.

2020 - Throughout my journey, I worked as a software engineer. Our curriculum has proven to be pretty effective and I'm currently in the process of hiring some students who started coding at our library into my engineering team. My goal this year is to launch our curriculum to the world for free as open source.

Due to the current pandemic, we have paused all in person meetup groups and we interact online. If you want to beta test our product, start here: https://c0d3.com/book

Currently, the main way the tool shows you how to optimize your profit is to show how much money you can make from exercising early. We also help you exercise the options with no personal recourse to you if the company goes under (we take a % of the profit during liquidation).

This is a problem I have faced with my equity and my hope is that a tool like this can help others from making similar mistakes with their equity.

Check out the product at https://equifi.io/ and please let me know if you have any questions!

I'm including some nice metrics and examples like Swarmpit, Swarmprom, Grafana, Gitlab CE + Gitlab Runner and documentation using Docusaurus. It works with any amount of server nodes so it's easy to start with a single test server and expand as you go.

I'm planning to open-source it ASAP, but things take time.. Hopefully next week v0.1 is done. Mostly it's been a learning experience, finally getting more fluent with bash and learning about distributed systems and networking. I've used Dokku for years but I wanted more flexibility and experience. I've noticed that I learn better when I write about something, so I'm putting extra effort in writing documentation.

It's funny that this question comes up, I just thought about it today. We should have #madeinquarantine badges for our repo's!