I'm really excited to announce a new meetup in Chicago for people who want to learn more about programming, but need a solid place to start. It's called Anyone Can Learn To Code (of all things!), and it's free, and anyone can join. The official Meetup.com link for the group is here. To repeat the official meetup group description, as I've posted there: "Have you ever thought about learning to ...

After conducting my web development mentoring service for over a year now, I've decided to transform it into a web development bootcamp - as I'm sure you've noticed on our home page! But why? For those of you who don't know, the Anyone Can Learn To Code mentoring service was a one-on-one training program in which I taught Ruby on Rails to people from all backgrounds, including those who have ...

Explaining how to do things is very hard. You already know how to do X. Bob has never done X before. He has never even seen X being done before. And you need to teach him how to do X. If X is hard, then explaining how to do X is even harder. Why? First off, communication is hard in general. But here it's even worse. You need to essentially boil down X into spoken (or written) words, and then B...

Continuing our series on teaching tech, I'd like to identify another key ingredient of good teaching. (My definition of good teaching is teaching so that the students successfully learn the material that is being taught.) And this ingredient is: It is critical to teach concepts in the proper order. Start with the basics, and build upon them with each subsequent lesson (or section of a lesson). ...

I think a lot about teaching. Which means that I think even more about how people learn. It may seem obvious that if one understands how people learn, then one can be a better teacher, but it seems that many teachers focus little on the human learning process, and just make sure that they're delivering content. But this is a drastic mistake. One key to understanding how the human brain learns ...