Today the second cohort at Makers Academy starts and the first cohort commences their 5th week of the 10 week program.
It’s time we start to talk more about why we’re building Makers Academy and what we intend to ultimately achieve.
In 2010 I decided to teach myself how to program iPhone applications. With no previous programming knowledge, I dove head-first into Objective-C on a ride of frustration that culminated almost a year later with a couple of mediocre applications on the app store and a surface-level understanding of what I was doing.
Years later, I now understand that there are far easier paths to learning how to code. I would waste days trying to find some small error because I didn’t understand how to debug correctly. I would try to wrap my head around multithreading without fully understanding the implications of MVC separation. The problem is that as a complete novice, I couldn’t accurately prioritize what I should be focusing on at the different stages of my development.
While I was staying up until 2AM trying to figure out how to make my code compile, Evgeny (my cofounder) was banging his head against the wall trying to hire competent developers at Forward Internet Group in London.
A graduate with a master’s degree in computer science would come in and be able to rattle off algorithm-efficiency logarithms with ease, but when asked to set up a GitHub repository and build a simple rails application, they were lost.
When Evgeny and I put the pieces of our past together and starting researching the problem in-depth, we unearthed a variety of problems that I’ve documented in “Why is Learning to Code so Hard.” It almost seems as if computer science degrees put people on the path to becoming computer science professors, more so than practical programmers. (CS degrees are important for some types of software development such as 3d modeling and advanced artificial intelligence, but it’s far from necessary for all developers.)
Armed with a deeper understanding of the problem, we now ask ourselves, “How can we use this information to make the most substantial impact?”
Over the last few years, the average number of University students studying computer science have increased by 1%, while the number of jobs have increased 21%.
As Marc Andreessen so famously puts it, software really is eating the world. Farmers are learning to program to better manage their plots and increase crop-yields. “Growth Hacker” is the new zeitgeist term that refers to someone with an in-depth understanding of both software development and marketing. Biologists today actually spend more time in front of computers than they do in laboratories because programs exist that can simulate biological reactions.
With this increase in the demand for people that know how to program, where are they going to come from? Is four years at University sitting through lectures and getting drunk three nights per week truly the most efficient way to learn?
Makers Academy is our solution to this problem. Ten intensive weeks of full-time programming to establish the foundational elements of being an entry-level programmer. A platform to provide the world’s most efficient introduction to programming principles.
Makers Academy is not for everyone. Some people are okay investing the time and money into getting a computer science degree and that’s great. Others are okay with the inefficiencies in teaching themselves and just want to learn enough to get by.
For the rest, we’re building Makers Academy.
Originally published at blog.makersacademy.com on March 18, 2013.
