Ask HN: How can we help more people to start coding in 2015?

4 points by fmotlik 11 years ago | 2 comments

As a community I think we agree that we need to get more people interested to join our little neck of the woods. So how about sharing what we’ve found to be great groups and causes over the last year so we can all find and work together on those in 2015. Some that we worked with and enjoyed:

http://www.resilientcoders.org/ - Talked to a group of students there, really interesting cause. If you’re in Boston definitely reach out to David (happy to introduce as well)

http://railsgirls.com/ - We helped out with a few of those events in Austria. Has always been fun and a great way to help more women get started in software development

https://codestarter.org/ - Collects donations to give laptops to kids to get into programming and CS. Great initiative started by Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner where we happily donated a laptop (and so should every other funded Startup)

What are organisations, events or causes that you’ve found great and that the community should support? Which cities do you need help in?

If you’re looking for help in either Boston, MA or Vienna, Austria reach out to me: flo@codeship.com

daly 11 years ago |

Coding is easy. Anyone can learn to code.

What makes programming hard is the frustration. Almost everything you write will fail in some obscure way. The levels of frustration in programming knows no bound.

Even worse, very few people will be "software blacksmiths" who write code from scratch. Programming at most jobs seems to be writing glue code from one framework to another. Failures in frameworks are a whole new level of frustration. At best you hope that Home Depot has a new better framework in their software section.

And in the long term we will have managers who took a three-day "learn to program" course and wrote a working fizz-buzz program. We will hear "I wrote programs. It is easy. What is taking so long?"... a whole meta-level of frustration.

Programming is as easy as writing a recipe. I can read a recipe. But I can't cook.

So keep your expectations of these "learn to program" initiatives within bounds. Autodidacts who find frustrations a "challenge" will succeed just as they have in the past. The rest will find programming as interesting as algebra.

ainiriand 11 years ago |

We develop a project to teach kids how to code, bitbloq.bq.com by the use of small Arduino robots. It is really easy to use and the kids love it. We are starting now in a few schools and we are having a big success.