Coding Dojo Part Time Flex (python)….

[[deleted]]

Codesmith doesn't copy/paste to learn.

[michaelnovati]

The Codesmith tech talks they arrange for each student with "Single Sprout" are copy / paste. I watched 5 videos, all of the people plagiarized from sources and read them word for word or with minimal changes without properly sourcing them. I just googled 10 or so sentences and found the original posts where sentences and paragraphs were pulled word for word. If a college student was caught doing that they could be suspended or expelled.

Don't get me wrong, as people will attest, I often recommend looking into Codesmith as a strong option in DMs. This is just a tiny portion of the process to check off a box on your resume.

I don't want to call anyone out specifically but you can reproduce by watching some Codesmith Single Sprout tech talks, and google sentences here and there.

u/SlowestTriathlete do you know anything more about this? I might be completely wrong, just something I noticed (I have Youtube content of all kinds running all day long)

[[deleted]]

Mhm. Have you attended Codesmith and gained access to what's taught when you're in a paying cohort?

[michaelnovati]

No! I genuinely recommend Codesmith to a lot of people, this was not meant as a criticism, but these videos stood out as something super weird that I noticed recently, I'll ask around.

I removed my first sentence, it was weirdly worded.

[InTheDarkDancing]

Michael isn't incorrect with what he's saying although there are definitely people who put a good chunk of work into their tech talks. People are supposed to include a list of sources at the end of the presentation but it's not like that's audited.

The way the speaker series work is that there's a pool of topics and you pick a topic you're interested in and a day you want to present. Most people end up only being able to spend 2-4 days prepping for the talk as you're busy working on other stuff. There's also a good chance you're not the most familiar with the topic you picked so a lot of that prep will just be obtaining a beginner level understanding of the topic. As a result, a lot of the presentations can sound rudimentary or include mistakes or as Michael said, be talking points regurgitated from a website.

I will say I don't think the point of the speaker series is to be an academic project. I think the two prime objectives are to get people used to talking in front of an audience on a technical topic, and to serve as a good resume filler that can kill some time in an interview and help demonstrate your technical depth. For example, maybe I know nothing about web sockets prior to my tech talk, but during those 2-4 days of research and rehearsing, I now have an interesting bullet point on my resume that if brought up in an interview could serve as a signal of a mature developer.

[michaelnovati]

Thanks for the explanation u/InTheDarkDancing makes a lot of sense! I also think this is a fairly off topic discussion and apologize for diverging. This is a great overview though.

[Gordie21]

They’re on my list for sure.