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I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

codeamigo.dev

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Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#141

Post by kome »

m00x wrote: post #133

I'll be honest, this is a great start and a good app that not a lot of people would achieve and deliver. Hopefully this feedback can be constructive. It does not feel like a modern "professional" app though, the design is extremely lacking and not something you'd see from an intermediate+ frontend dev. The "New lesson" part doesn't work because it's behind an auth check, but there's no error message and it's displaye…

> It does not feel like a modern "professional" app though

True, it feels better that the standard "modern professional" design that you see nowadays, that it is just boring. Here you see some personality and functionality.

Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#142

Post by madaxe_again »

susam wrote: post #71
grifball wrote: post #12

>My favorite part of the photographic process was watching prints come to life. I loved starting with a blank sheet of paper and applying various photographic methods to bring the image to life. >I found that building websites was similarly satisfying. For example, click the "Reveal Image" button to watch an image fade in to the blank canvas! I think a lot about why I went into computer science and this is the same c…

My introduction to computers was similar. I began by learning turtle graphics in the Logo programming language during my childhood days. It allowed me to be creative and draw pictures on a blank canvas using code. Back then, for me, programming was not about solving useful problems. Instead it was about expressing whatever random ideas come to mind. Quoting a relevant excerpt from my own blog post[1] that I wrote som…

Similar sort of experience, although we had no turtle, so it was BASIC on the MICRO for us.

  10 MODE 7
  20 PRINT CHR$141”A text adventure”
  30 PRINT CHR$141”A text adventure”
May as well have been the opening bars of Beethoven’s 5th, for the infinite and incredible possibilities which followed. Anything. I could make anything. It was the most incredible sensation and realisation - and still is.

Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#143

Post by splistud »

jgwil2 wrote: post #121
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Dodged a bullet I'd argue that Codecademy dodged a bullet. Calling them out by name is in really bad taste IMO. Let's be honest: if he had launched a coding tutorial website thing and it didn't have the "comeback story" marketing narrative then no one would care.

If it's so easy to build a coding tutorial website, then what advantage does Codecademy have beyond name recognition? So you're not competing with their tech, you're competing with their marketing. You say bad taste, I say good marketing.

Content? Seems like a good advantage to have for a tutorial website.

Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#144

Post by bitwize »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #86
aspencer8111 wrote: post #35

Good on you man! You: 1. Dodged a bullet (booo on any company that would reject someone with this level of passion). 2. Created your own product (which you seem even more passionate about) 3. Did all the heavy lifting to make it interesting out of the gate (provided content). Wishing you all the success!

> 1. Dodged a bullet (booo on any company that would reject someone with this level of passion). Passion is a double-edged sword: When a person's passions align closely with the company's needs, it's wonderful. But if a person's passions conflict with what the founders want, the passion can amplify the conflict. That's why it's important to understand exactly what the candidate is passionate about. If they're passion…

This is why it's important, in the corporate world, to cultivate a VB programmer's or PHP programmer's mindset, no matter what language you're working in: your passion should be with the business and solving exactly the business problem at hand, and treating your programming tools strictly as tools in service of the business.

Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#145

Post by Jenk »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #83
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets me too. In high school I called it "the power of a blank text file." Something about knowing that this was how every great software product began life was very empowering and intoxicating to me. When you open vim and look at the blinking cursor, you stand on the precipice of greatness in the shoes of every programmer who has ever lived, all of you united across space and time by that peculiar feeling you ge…

I suppose this is what "high self-effiacy"[0] means. I've only recently learned this word/concept, but your quote fits. You see a blank text file, you see an interesting challenge, something you're sure will lead you somewhere nice. I'm gonna admit - I'm the opposite. A blank text file scares me . I don't know what to do. I spend a lot of time agonizing over what I want to write, trying to desperately narrow the spac…

This may come across as facetious and/or condescending, despite my intentions to be to give actual advice here... Learning TDD is what helped me get past this. It's surely not the only way to do it but it really made it click when I did.

In learning the craftsman style of TDD (i.e., the fluffy altruistic style) helped me to grok breaking down tasks, not because I wasn't able to have a detailed view of the big picture in my head, but because I simply didn't need to. It's also ok to change what you've already done. The guidelines for code modularity and separation are there to make this process of change and evolution easier, not just to make the system arch and code pretty, but because it should be expected to change and evolve your code as you develop the system - in both the short and long term.

Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#147

Post by KerryJones »

pkrotich wrote: post #115
mylons wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it best to give Codeacademy the benefit of the doubt? They likely hire by committee, like any tech company. In that scenario it's entirely dependent on who the committee is. It's not like Codeacademy, or any company for that matter, has some idempotent interviewing process. If you changed the interview panels, or some of the questions, the candidate may likely have received an offer.

Have you hired anyone? Asking because your comment make it sounds like there's science to it. I don't like the committee hiring as well but team or manager level hiring can segment the company culture. Also individuals can be biased and hire based on vibes or who is like them etc. - committee brings a check to that, that's why it's common. The truth is - you'll miss some great candidates because they simply interview…

I have -- quite a few times in quite a few different jobs. There actually is a lot more science to it than we usually take credit for. There have been studies that our typical interview process gives us 17% predictability of how they will perform, but if we do a contract-to-hire (of just one week) that improves to 80%.

We have proven time and time again that certain times of interview questions are not helpful.

If you look at the best investors, their job is similar, I would say that most notably as YC being crazy successful and found similarly in my own hiring is that passion for a given space is one of the best predictors of success.

Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#148

Post by a1369209993 »

boneskull wrote: post #140
dimitrios1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring is hard. We, as an industry, simply cannot interview. We don't know how to accurately gauge a candidates experience, personality or knowledge. We can only make them perform monkey-see-monkey-do on a whiteboard or through stupid, asinine puzzles and leetcode style exercises. To make matters worse, we often place our most senior software developers on interview circuits. For better or for worse, engineers trend…

it’s “crapshoot” as in the game of craps, meaning “it’s a gamble” but crap-chute is pretty good too. just not for this sentence

> > the whole process of understanding one's personality, how they think, and whether or not they'll be a fit for the company

It's a chute you shovel crap into (or out of), with no justifiable expectation of useful results. The interview process as a whole is a crapshoot, but the process of understanding the candidate is a crap chute.

Re: I was rejected by Codecademy three times, so I built my own

#149

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jenk wrote: post #145
TeMPOraL wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose this is what "high self-effiacy"[0] means. I've only recently learned this word/concept, but your quote fits. You see a blank text file, you see an interesting challenge, something you're sure will lead you somewhere nice. I'm gonna admit - I'm the opposite. A blank text file scares me . I don't know what to do. I spend a lot of time agonizing over what I want to write, trying to desperately narrow the spac…

This may come across as facetious and/or condescending, despite my intentions to be to give actual advice here... Learning TDD is what helped me get past this. It's surely not the only way to do it but it really made it click when I did. In learning the craftsman style of TDD (i.e., the fluffy altruistic style) helped me to grok breaking down tasks, not because I wasn't able to have a detailed view of the big picture…

It doesn't come across as facetious/condescending. Thank you for your advice.

I'm actually using a TDD-ish approach in my work, but I never felt comfortable letting it actually drive design decisions. I don't believe it works that way - I can explore the design space up front and pick good solutions faster than it would take me to organically arrive at them through applying orthodox TDD.

I'd like to do more TDD-ish approach, because the design process feels way too slow to me. The problem is, refactoring involved in test-driven design discovery is even slower. I constantly feel bottlenecked by the speed of tooling we use - and not on the surface level (I have my Emacs configured well, thank you), but at a fundamental one. Programming languages are not expressive enough. The whole approach of writing code as plaintext document is not ergonomic enough.

When I'm sitting in front of an empty text file, staring at the sea of infinite possibilities, all I feel is dread - the fear of how much effort I'm going to spend fighting tools to conceptualize my design, how much time I'm going to waste dealing with infrastructure, build systems, dependency management, constructing intermediary layers, writing and rewriting tests...

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