Tech Startup Pizza Night
7pm on Monday, December 19th @ Olio (3 Greenwich Ave, New York, NY)
I don’t go to enough meetups, and the startup I run isn’t a tech company, but still, love these nights and always meet super interesting people. My buddies Emil and Gabriel are setting it up, plenty of pizza and conversation. They did this event last month and it sounded like a huge success, so hopefully we get a repeat on that one.
They’re trying out a “theme” for these nights now (this one is “Meet Your Designer”), so we’ll see how it goes. As a founder with very little design talent on our side, it could be extremely valuable for me if some designers showed up…but it might be better to keep things general in the future.
Code Academy and Treehouse and Beyond
The top item on Hacker News right now is Treehouse, a site for learning web design, development, and iOS development in bite-size tutorials and quizzes, similar to Codeacademy. When Codeacademy launched earlier this summer, I made it through like 4 or 5 lessons before realizing I was actually coding and not just flipping through the site like I normally do. That’s powerful. With Treehouse, I didn’t dive right in, but am really impressed with their on-boarding process and design. It’s all very smooth and comforting (which is important for learning software, which can often be really intimidating beyond the subject itself), and leads you down the right funnel easily. I can’t speak to the quality of the lessons, because I got hung up on the pricing page and never went back, but the intro video for the Web Design courses looks promising.
These sites, along with Khan Academy and a few others, are just the tip of the iceberg for what’s possible in learning new skills on the web. And platforms like Skillshare are bringing that learning community together online to learn offline (like Meetup for teaching). There’s so much potential here, it’s all very exciting. As someone who is constantly looking at stuff and saying “man I wish I knew how to [blank],” it’s very encouraging. Hopefully I’ll actually have the discipline to take some time to learn and do things with these new tools. Until then, I’ll just continue to comment on them :)
Treehouse
1 year ago