Impact can be from the viewpoint of career, hobby skills or life in general. It is you who knows what aspect of you the course has impacted. And why do you think so?
Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
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Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#2Taking a Data Security course in college and learning about the OSI model was the first time the modern computing paradigm clicked with me. Everything felt vague and abstract till then.
There after understanding basic threat modeling it gave me much more confidence in myself as I could see my own programs as a cake to which I knew every ingredient and possible way it could be poisoned… one step closer to being an all round dessert chef.
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#3“Just Money: Banking as if Society Mattered” Available on edX and MIT OpenCourseWare
Putting money to a good use, caring about society and the environment.
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#4Taking a Data Security course in college and learning about the OSI model was the first time the modern computing paradigm clicked with me. Everything felt vague and abstract till then. There after understanding basic threat modeling it gave me much more confidence in myself as I could see my own programs as a cake to which I knew every ingredient and possible way it could be poisoned… one step closer to being an all…
Care to link the course you took? The OSI model was always a bit abstract to me since college.
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#5“Just Money: Banking as if Society Mattered” Available on edX and MIT OpenCourseWare Putting money to a good use, caring about society and the environment.
What impact did it have on you. How did you change afterwards?
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#6MITx had a profound impact on my life when the platform launched in 2011. Ditto edX.org in 2012.
At the time, I was a college dropout. My job history looked like: self-employed, Starbucks, and a bunch of catering per diem gigs. I didn't know what a "software engineer" did, although I had a vague desire to make video games (but no idea how).
I was technical enough to install WordPress with Cpanel and resell hosting to mom/pop businesses, but I couldn't really code beyond copy/pasting PHP snippets.
The Intro to Computer Science series on MITx changed everything. I remember finishing a homework assignment (hangman game), then immediately looking for more things to code, even though the assignment took me 8+ hours.
I was hooked! Within a few months, I landed a gig at a video game studio ($15/hour dream job). My job was a mix of QA, systems admin, gameplay design, and tools programming.
A few years after that, I shook Ned Batchelder's hand after his Pycon 2015 talk. I was a software engineer at Red Hat by then, but still feeling like I'd snuck in through the back door. Knowing that I'd aced MIT coursework helped me push down my insecurities, even years later.
By my early 30s, I was millionaire - thanks entirely to my software engineering career. I quit my day job last year to take another swing at entrepreneurship, and it blows my mind to compare then/now.
Thanks to everyone who made MITx and Edx.org. Y'all changed my life!
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#7“Just Money: Banking as if Society Mattered” Available on edX and MIT OpenCourseWare Putting money to a good use, caring about society and the environment.
What impact did it have on you. How did you change afterwards?
It made me realize there are ways for capitalism to be “ethical”, that not all banks are trying to make a profit at all costs and that there are investors that track and optimize for other metrics besides monetary returns, e. g., community impact.
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#8Front end conference https://aneventapart.com because it helped focus on the important parts of the web, like new standard features and accessibility.
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#9- Single Variable and Multivariate Calculus from MIT-OCW was my first ever MOOC. Was in Junior year in High School. This changed for my whole life how I see Math, learning, and knowledge itself. Before it, I was just a algorithm-following, practicing, A+ getting student with not much love for Math. This enabled me to learn Math properly.
- Not a MOOC, but I read Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, Walker, and it also had the same big impact on me- in terms of changing my whole worldview about learning and knowledge and books.
- In my last year of college, I took IBM Data Science Professional Certificate course on Coursera. It did not have much technical depth at all. But it introduced me to Data Science.
- Then I took Andrew Ng's ML and DL on Coursera. Learned a lot. Connected the dots from back. Learning the Math properly that was triggered by MIT-OCW, finally paid off as all ML concepts were promptly undetstood by me.
- fast.ai course. It helped me build practical AI projects. Jeremy Howard is among the best instructors out there. I got my first job after this course. I made a lot of projects as well.
- Deep Learning course by Yann LeCun and Alfredo Canziani from NYU. Learned most DL from this course. It has made me a much better researcher.
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- Mathematics for Machine Learning from Imperial College, London.
- Computational Neuroscience from Neuromatch Academy. It has unlocked the "Hacker mentality" in me.
Re: Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?
#10Algorithms and data structure is the only career-related value I got out of university. It was essential knowledge.
However the mandatory engineering class were the most valuable overall, as I would never have studied those otherwise. They keep coming up in everyday life.
In community college (rough approximation of what CÉGEP is), I had a bunch of bullshit classes that changed the course of my private life: film, photography, philosophy, etc. It made me amore well-rounded person, even though I didn't see the point at the time. That's why the classes were mandatory.