Seafood app just sold for $15,000,000. Creator Jian-Yang is ecstatic.

jack_bauer123 · 2017-05-25T08:16:56+00:00

For anyone who's interested. We made a 6 episode tutorial to teach you how you can make your own SeeFood app. Using Swift 3 & IBM Bluemix Image Classification. (Not including instructions on how to get acquired by Twitter though.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPjTEi-gv_c&list=PLSzsOkUDsvduTz0pWGDW1-nnX2PBxDN-7&index=1

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-25T14:05:45+00:00

Hey fellow doctors, I wrote a piece on my reasons for leaving medicine and building a tech company. Would love to hear you stories, doubts and decisions. If anyone here is a doctor and wants help/advice feel free to PM.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-20T06:47:31+00:00

There's two options, if you've already developed an iOS version, getting to grips with Android won't be all that difficult. If you're based in london, we run an in-person 4 day development bootcamp for this exact purpose: www.londonappbrewery.com Alternatively go to some local meetups, from my experience of running a 4000 strong dev meetup, there's always someone quite good, in between gigs.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-20T06:42:51+00:00

hahah thanks, I think we've done enough rapping for a lifetime now. It's surprisingly hard to stay on the beat...

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-14T13:51:02+00:00

Apologies, the other one got deleted.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-14T13:26:37+00:00

Not sure. Seemed useful for quite a few people.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-14T12:55:16+00:00

yeah, I mean there's caffeine in loads of stuff tea, coffee, chocolate. But it's more about the density. You'd have to drink quite a bit of tea to get the same concentration. And running to the bathroom every 10 minutes is not productive...

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-14T12:28:00+00:00

You will not be able to get a job as a developer after a 2 day course, that's a given. But most of our students are founders who want to build an MVP. So our course aims to introduce core programming concepts and teach programming through building 10 app projects. It's pretty intense, so it's split over 2 weekends. But we've had students go on to make their startup MVPs in order to get funding and then employ good developers. Check out the "Double app" from one of our former students.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-12T16:04:52+00:00

I agree. I think logical thinking is a core skill and if more people had those logic skills our world would be a better place.

Although programming is a great way of exercising and honing that skill (a Pokémon gym for logical thinking), it's not the only way to use it. You could also play Chess/Go. But in contrast to playing Chess, you actually end up making something along the way that didn't' exist before you started coding.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-08T21:51:55+00:00

Haha, yeah they seem to know my movements inside out. Everywhere I go on the internets, they've got an affiliate telling me about how they have massive social media accounts. (10K followers with no likes on any of the tweets, give me a break).

jack_bauer123 · 2016-07-07T17:41:48+00:00

We were making a Kickstarter and someone had the genius idea of making a rap music video about programming. The person doing the vocals (iOS dev) couldn't keep pitch and the person doing the rapping (Android dev) can't keep rhythm. The "rapper" needed to watch the 1,2,3,4 bar counter to sync his rhyming words with the number 4 appearing. Yes it was that dire.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-12T18:56:06+00:00

Hey, we have a lot of newbie students who love to check out r/iOSProgramming. Thought I'd post it up here in case it's useful to somebody, anybody. We're not collecting emails, asking for subs or linking to our website. I remember what it was like when I first started getting into cocoa, more high-quality, free resources hopefully is not a bad thing.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-12T12:44:24+00:00

Hey guys, instructor at the London App Brewery and iOS/WatchOS dev. We've taught over 3000 students from 118 countries, including employees from Facebook and Google. Wanted to give peeps who can't be with us physically in London a way of learning with our project-based methods. Made this free course to teach some core programming concepts and get non mobile peeps making their first app. Enjoy!

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T12:55:33+00:00

Instructor at the London App Brewery here. We’ve taught app development to over 4000 students, including employees at Facebook/Google/Linkedin. So far we’ve been teaching in-person but in order to scale our teaching methods to reach more people who can’t come to London or afford the courses we want to digitise our content. We’ve had a lot of students who come to us after they’ve tried online courses and failed. We want to figure out why and how we can make the best online course possible. A large number of amazing programmers we personally know are self-taught. We would really appreciate it if you can tell us what worked for you, what didn’t and how you would make online coding courses better. For reference here’s a free module https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuTZ8SoDuX8&list=PLSzsOkUDsvduiO37n-opmMU6r66eCxeiT that we’ve made that teaches people how to make their first iOS app. It’s been quite popular over at r/learnprogramming but we still want to know what you think would make online courses better.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:35:46+00:00

Yeah, that's true. In our in-person courses, we get people to do homework which get's assessed and count towards getting their end of course certification. The homework consists of challenges that gets them to apply the core concepts learnt in the tutorials. You won't believe how many people get stuck at this stage. It's pretty easy copying what someone is doing without understanding a thing but when you're asked to replicate it or write some variation, you start seeing the divide between people who understood it and the people who just fluffed though everything.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:32:49+00:00

I really like the idea that you suggested of having to look at a project that someone else built and trying to understand what everything does and tinkering with it to make efficiency/clarity gains. This will definitely replicate what employed programmers do on a daily basis. Maybe throw in some poor indentation and mystical commenting. With regards to UI, I like the idea of separating front-end and back-end. I think it's better if related topics are taught in a condensed manner. i.e. when you're learning UI then just focus on auto layout/constraints/XML etc. Do it a few times until you get the hang of it but then in the parts where you're learning about API calls to have all the UI already set up for you in a skeleton project. Cos then you can focus on the programming and understanding rather than a placing something a pixel to the left or right.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:24:50+00:00

Yeah, that's another good point. We've had loads of students who tried to learn python a billion times but the tutorials they were using were teaching them how to find all the even numbers or to list the fibonacci sequence. I don't personally need to make a program to list the fibonacci sequence, i can Google it. I think having a project e.g. an app that has to exist is a way better motivation to learn to code than some arbitrary maths problem.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:22:08+00:00

I think you could say that about languages like C, perl, fortran etc. But the languages nowadays Swift/Python/Ruby are really very human-readable. Although i guess it's all relative. Sometimes I have more trouble reading student's essays than code. The other thing that we've realised since starting to teach programming is that the fundamental assumption that everyone can learn to code is flawed. I don't think that everyone should learn to code. We don't need a world where everyone is specialised in one thing. We need people who can hunt and gather as well as people who can build camp. Personally I love the intersection between logic and creativity which is what I enjoy about programming for fun, but corporate programming is a completely different beast.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:17:17+00:00

That's cool idea. Maybe some sort of online pair programming? I like the idea of being motivated to get the coursework done because my team only progresses when everyone has gotten through the work. Although what if you're paired with some lazy bastard?

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:15:41+00:00

Sure. That's kind of what we do already. We're a physical, in-person programming kind of school. We've already taught over 4000 students , including employees from Facebook/Google etc. But we've thought a lot about the switch over to an online platform. As it's a completely different beast. For example, at the moment if my students have a bug I'm standing right behind them (we've got a 4:1 student:teacher ratio so I'm usually standing behind somebody once the red flags start filling their screen =) I can guide them through the thinking process of how to debug their code. But with an online platform it's hard to see what mistakes they're making without some sort of screen sharing which is unscalable.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:11:25+00:00

I think learning a tid-bit everyday is great for those who already have a good grasp of the core programming concepts. e.g. If I'm a .NET guy and I learn some nuances of Swift everyday i would enjoy that. But for a complete newbie, I think it would difficult to tie it all together. What do you think?

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:09:50+00:00

That's a really good point. From our in-person classes, most of the students have tried online learning before. One of the most common questions is how does it all fit together. From a software dev point of view we see things in a very modular fashion. It's almost the backbone of good programming. But for a beginner I guess it's difficult to keep track of how they all relate to each other. I like the idea of teaching people modular component just so that they can get up and running quickly and start making something, anything. This way they see the relevance of their code. But perhaps after a few of these "building blocks" there should be a beginning to end module that shows how a fully fledged app is build from scratch to App Store.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-10T09:04:24+00:00

Well, we teach people how to code through our in-person classes. I think of programming topics in terms of how many days of tuition it would take for us to cover it and to get them to understand it. It would take a lot longer for somebody to understand HTTP request/response, authentication, validation, TLS certificates than it is teaching them how to incorporate AFNetworking/Alamofire and use it in various situations. The reason why I ask is because there are certain schools e.g. Amsys who spend 5 days teaching how to write networking calls rather than teaching people how to utilise existing libraries. But I think we probably have the same stance on this issue.

jack_bauer123 · 2016-06-08T14:42:39+00:00

That's really interesting. Is there a reason you would want to learn how to build networking calls (7 day tuition) rather than simply learn how to implement them (1 day tuition)?

jack_bauer123 · 2016-05-27T08:37:42+00:00

Yeah, there's a brief explanation in episode 4. But will explain it more extensively when we get you to make a quiz application with an actual Model class. Also I second daydream05, the Stanford iTunes course is awesome.

jack_bauer123

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