I quit my job as a software engineer at Google early this year to teach people how to code. I started paying people $15/hr to learn so they can make ends meet while learning instead of working at Walmart.
I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).
Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.
2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.
Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.
Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.
We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.
While your post is getting lots of reads, you should set up a landing page to collect email addresses. That way, when you have your non-profit set up, you send an email out asking for donations.
This is absolutely awesome. Sounds like a really great way to make the world a better place.
Not everybody is using fb, I hope you'll finish your http://garagescript.org/ website soon because now most links don't seem to be working. When you provide more details I think you may find some people who are willing to donate. E.g. is non-profit registered under garagescript? I couldn't find it. Well at least make contact and linkedin links working now that you are going to get some exposure from HN frontpage.
Got a bit too much into details, but what I meant to say, really great initiative, kudos.
What you're doing sounds great. I'm on the board of HackerDojo, our mission sounds pretty aligned to yours and you are not too far away - so get in touch, I'm sure we can figure out a way to support what you're doing! (will send pm also)
Responded, I think donating time is the best form of donation. Students want mentorship from industry veterans but its hard to find people willing to commit the time to mentor. Thank you for offering!
Making their own pools reminds me of PARC, and minimizing black boxes/assumptions must be very satisfying.
There's so many assumptions in mathematics, I've always assumed it must just take too much time/expertise to cover them properly. Engineering != math, but accomplishing that is revolutionary.
You know Wo/Man I think you should put up a page and ask for people to donate as sponsors. I think HN users alone, if we come together, could send 10,20,50,100 people through your program. I would be proud to know my few dollars helped in this way.
Yeah! Thats the plan for next year. It takes time to set up a donation platform as an NPO and we are working on it. In the meantime, I put an email signup (per baron816's suggestion) and will send out an email when donation tools are ready).
Hey, I tried doing something similar in my city. I found designing a useful curriculum a challenge. I would love to ask a few questions. Couldn't get hold of your email. My email is raghav.toshniwal at google's service.
I quit what many would consider a successfull job in programming and had a sabbatical year. Moved to a smaller town and down sized everything in spending to the point where I pay $600 per month for housing, food and bills, so living of my savings haven't been an issue at all.
I have focused on things like reading (read +40 books in 2017, up from 1-2 per year), wood working, sketching, running and skiing. To keep up my programming skills I have done a deep dive in new programming languages and fiddling with some side projects. It has been an incredible year for personal development and it has changed my perspective on what things are important in life (sitting in front of a screen 40-60 hours a week not being one of them). I highly recommend everyone to do this at least once in your career!
actually I moved back to friends and family. But it does get lonely sometimes when you don't have a strict schedule and lots of free time when people are locked in at their 9-5 jobs..
I'm 27 and I did the similar thing last year. Having plenty of time for personal development is indeed great. But to be honest, I'm anxious about the limited social networking in smaller town from time to time.
I am in my mid 30s, started my professional career in 2008. Hard to tell if when is a good time for doing it. My feeling is I should have done it earlier but I guess it depends on your situation. Maybe if you have an active social life and hobbies you love it will be easier at any point. If you have worked a lot and over long time I think friends/hobbies can fade, and it will be easier to fall into loneliness/depression if you quit working.
But, I think doing it early (say after ~3 years) has the advantage of settling/deepening the understanding of your work. Often the early years are super hectic and you try to be your best, neglecting things like mindful reflection. I believe sabbatical can help this, kind of like how sleep organizes and "cleans up" thoughts/memories. We need both the short sleep and "long" sleep.
Yuval, are you familiar with Barry Neil Kauffman’s work?
Specifically, his book Son Rise. It tells the story of how he and his wife cured their son of his autism.
From all of the research I've read, autism seems to be a neurological disorder. Is this not the case? Genuinely curious what led you down this road rather than others as I've been struggling to reason about similar issues and tendencies I've had.
What I am trying to do is change the contour of my forehead muscles so they don't feel as intense. The forehead muscle has nerves, so it is part of the nervous system.
What led me down this road is I found a study that said that people on the spectrum may have different facial features (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/children-with-autism-have-disti...). I reasoned my face looks very similar, and then realized that I experienced lots of muscle tension on my forehead.
In my work I identified roughly 16 major drivers of ASD, but most of them tend to manifest as a GABA/Glutmate imbalance or GABA dysfunction.
Lots of people have been cured depending on if their ASD was caused by biological dysfunction - for example I know one who had biontidinase dysfunction so biotin supplementation cured all symptoms.
Hopefully you’ve identified the driver of your ASD and it will help you achieve your goals!
I learned to deal with my personal Aspergers but despite the social issues it caused earlier in my life deeply value the weird thinking processes it has given me.
Interesting. I know an autistic person with cerebral folate deficiency who takes medication for it, and it has significantly improved his symptoms. I wouldn't call it a permanent cure, however.
As mentioned, I believe the driver is my facial structure. I know that normally, facial structure is not the cause of a condition, but the muscle tension on my forehead is caused by my facial structure, and I suspect that muscle tension is most likely the cause of the symptoms I face.
Thank you :). The external link was only to source one of the images, so I'm not sure if I should bother replacing it.
I actually know quite a lot about math and science, but my major difficulty is not being able to hold down a career where I have to apply math/science (though I have difficulty staying focused at most jobs that require substantial abstract ability).
In addition to Hooke's law, I simply felt a lot of muscle tension on my forehead growing up. Because I essentially had that feeling from birth though, I didn't consciously notice it until recently.
Interesting. Have you found a difference in your sleep patterns since getting the treatment? One anecdote I've heard is that people on the spectrum have difficulty entering REM sleep[1]. Since REM sleep is partially initiated by eye movement, it makes sense that forehead and sinus shape could impact it.
This sounds cool! You seem high functioning. I know someone who's low functioning, about grade 2-3 mentality and can't keep conversations going for long. No savant level skills either. How does your work affect people on that end of the spectrum? Do you see any of your work applying to them? Sorry if you've answered any of this in your research. I'll check your site out more tomorrow.
It will have little to no impact on low-functioning autism, unfortunately :(. Researching low functioning autism is far more complicated than the type of research I am doing.
BTW, I am diagnosed as high-functioning, but I am not so high-functioning that I can "pass" for normal or even close to normal in public. That is starting to change though.
Left $150k software engineering job (well got fired for making video called "9 Ways to cope with having a boring 9-5 job" which somebody found and sent to HR) to make videos about stuff I think is interesting (https://www.youtube.com/c/JDiculous1https://www.facebook.com/HonestLogic), with a slant towards addressing wage slavery, basic income, student loans, capitalism, etc. Still in the early stages, but I'll be hitting this hard in 2018.
You will get the experiences you need to go where you're going; being fired for pointing out obvious is not that bad, you did nothing wrong, it's their shitty karma. Can't you see the irony in doing something like that on facebook? The solution starts with making the right choices yourself.
Yea it's pretty lame seeing as how the video was posted under a pseudonym, meaning that person did some serious digging and clearly had an agenda (I'm 95% sure who it was). It's all good though, I had been wanting to leave for a long time but had kept putting it off for the "right moment". I'm glad that that decision was made for me because now there's nothing to regret.
In the US this would be 100% legal. For almost all jobs, you can fire someone for any reason (I don't like your shirt, your jokes weren't funny, it's a Tuesday) or literally no reason at all. The exceptions are few and far between - unions provide additional protection via collective bargaining agreements; you can't fire someone for being in a protected class (i.e. because of their race or gender); and you can't fire someone in retaliation for something like a wage complaint. You could almost certainly fire someone for making a video you don't like (unless they're in a union, which is very few tech employees.)
Yea it's legal here in the U.S. since it was at-will employment. They tried to play down the effect of the video and made up some vague performance-related reasons.
It's all good though, I was planning to leave anyways.
Quitting my full-time job to pursue my side-projects was the best thing I could have done for my health and sanity this year.
I am now working on a bunch of ideas that I hope will help some people around here:
1. A Pocket-to-Kindle service that syncs (almost) instantly to your Kindle whatever article you save, formats it like a professionally edited book, cleans up ads and takes advantage of the new typesetting engine inside the new Kindle firmware.
2. A Spotify music discovery website.
I'm trying to make a two-click-playlist-generator by using Spotify APIs to look at the top artists/genres of a user and create playlists on the fly with tracks that the user could like.
I use Spotify daily and found myself overwhelmed by how much music there is available. Because of that, I'm mostly listening to my saved songs, Discover Weekly/Release Radar and trying out playlists that usually have the same too popular songs.
3. An adaptive brightness/contrast app for external monitors. Adjusting brightness using the monitor's controls is always annoying to do.
4. A morning alarm that starts playing an algorithmically generated Spotify playlist each time, with fade-up volume, external speaker support, adaptive algorithm based on likes/dislikes and self-updating alarm times based on day moments (twilight, sunrise, golden hour, dusk etc.)
5. A detector for processes that eat up all your CPU and battery. I started writing this in Rust so I can make it cross-platform and learn the language at a lower level.
I just recently joined Spotify. I have found their "we will play similar music after your music ends" feature to enable me to discover lots of new artists. I find it interesting you found Spotify lacking here, because I am finding the opposite.
I'm a long time Spotify user. I love that feature too and it worked very well for me when it first launched. But after a while it started playing the same songs that I have already heard many times. Spotify's algorithm is very unpredictable so I can't say it will work out the same for you. But if it will, at least you can have another try with what I'm trying to build ^_^
None of those ideas are ready for public use yet. I mean they work, I use them daily, but the interface for non-programmers is still in the works.
https://github.com/alin23/spfy is the core of that idea. If you want I can help you or your friend set it up. Or I can let you know when the finished website is ready.
Ad 1. I am really interested of about the progress of development of your service. I would love to see it as "Show HN" submission.
Personally, I am thinking about developing an online service, which will be offerring general-purpose providing distribution of content to Kindle or other ebook-readers. Initially, I thought about creating only a app which will extract a article tag from website and create ebook from it (pandoc) or exactly a Pocket-to-Kindle. But when I was thinking more about it more ideas had come to my mind, HN-frontpage scrapper, simple notebook/orgmode adapted to Kindle Experimental Browser, markdown-files-to-ebook, arxiv-to-ebook converter, some kind of IFFTT pipeline (stream X from Y and save it as a ebook) and even trying to implement most of features known from Calibre application... If I could somehow help you as a developer or you are interested in bootstrapping some online service together I really would like to receive an e-mail from you. My e-mail address: (put my HN nickname here) at gmail.com
Was looking for same Poket->Kindle app, found nothing appropriate. Spent some time googling to gave up with idea of building such app. I thought nobody use kindle to read web this days. Solve my problem with push-to-kindle browser extension and manual file copying.
I would consider offering Instapaper as well as Pocket. I generally find Instapaper does a better job overall.
The number of times Pocket just either redirects to the original article, or drops salient bits of text (in particular, unordered list items) is really annoying.
It already works with Instapaper too, I just explain it as a Pocket to Kindle service because that's what people use the most these days.
Personally I use Instapaper more for reading because of all the premium features being free and keep Pocket in sync using IFTTT for their good recommendations.
I don't have any other source of income. I had a pretty good paying job for the past year and managed to save one year worth of savings. I can survive with what I have until June (I think). I'm doing my best to create something that helps at least a few people, and maybe get some money from that too.
Even if I don't, I have already learned and practiced so much more skills than I could if I had a full time job and that makes it worth it.
I can make you an (unofficial, free) beta tester if you want. I'll have most of the basic functionality by the end of January. If you're interested let me know here: alin.p32@gmail.com
Hosted Comments https://www.hostedcomments.com/ , a Disqus alternative with a focus on privacy. The learning experience of building Hosted Comments was great : using iframes to embed comments in websites, building a commenting system with voting and some features which Disqus does not have : locking comments, hiding comments (not yet deployed https://imgur.com/a/R89Cw ). It started out as a sideproject, then decided to go the SaaS route and now a little confused about whether I want to pursue this as my main project. I'm thinking about releasing an open source self hosted version and continue offering a managed service.
Bored Hackers https://www.boredhackers.com : a public chatroom based community site. Think of it like reddit, but chatrooms insteads of forums. I just deployed the first version a few hours ago. Bored Hackers is an experiment at building the community site that I wish existed : public chatroom based communites, pseudonymous users, transparent moderation logs, an open source code base and a site that is welcoming to non-technical users. Currently, there is a single chat room for all discussions and support for user created chat rooms will be added shortly.
I spent most of the year working my ass off consulting for one of America's most hated companies building an utterly pointless system. My only consolation is knowing that I wasted a ton of their money since there's no chance it will pay any returns.
How do you manage to continue working on something you know is a dead end though? Is the money that good? Would the money go away if you worked on another project at the same firm?
The school is free to students until they find a job, then they contribute with a % of their salary. After only 9 months, many students find internships and jobs at companies like NASA, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, Dropbox...
It's a life-changing experience for many of our students, and it also changes the Tech industry by bringing folks with an untraditional background. Our students are straight out of high-school, some had a career before: cashier, math teacher, artist, poker player...
We have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and collaborating with their peers. We are located in San Francisco and looking forward expanding.
"That is why there is no upfront cost to attend Holberton School. Once our graduates find a job, we only charge 17% of your internship earnings and 17% of your salary over 3 years."
Readit News
I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).
Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.
2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.
Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.
Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.
We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.
https://www.facebook.com/garagescript/
Not everybody is using fb, I hope you'll finish your http://garagescript.org/ website soon because now most links don't seem to be working. When you provide more details I think you may find some people who are willing to donate. E.g. is non-profit registered under garagescript? I couldn't find it. Well at least make contact and linkedin links working now that you are going to get some exposure from HN frontpage.
Got a bit too much into details, but what I meant to say, really great initiative, kudos.
All of the points you mentioned is in our top priority list for early 2018, thank you for pointing them out!
What were the holes that black-boxed you in your engineering growth?
1. Servers. I've always 'pushed to heroku' without really knowing how servers worked.
2. Git. I've always just used gitlab or other git hosting services without knowing how to build it.
3. File hosting. I've always just uploaded files without knowing how files are processed / stored.
4. Email. SMTP is like a big unknown, I've never really cared about how emails worked.
5. SSL. This was always done for me, I've never had to create and manage my own certificates.
https://hackerdojo.com/
There's so many assumptions in mathematics, I've always assumed it must just take too much time/expertise to cover them properly. Engineering != math, but accomplishing that is revolutionary.
Thanks!
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
I have focused on things like reading (read +40 books in 2017, up from 1-2 per year), wood working, sketching, running and skiing. To keep up my programming skills I have done a deep dive in new programming languages and fiddling with some side projects. It has been an incredible year for personal development and it has changed my perspective on what things are important in life (sitting in front of a screen 40-60 hours a week not being one of them). I highly recommend everyone to do this at least once in your career!
Is that in the US? Sounds really low...
You can very much pull that off in lots of small towns in the US, but yeah, you're living a close to thread bare lifestyle.
But, I think doing it early (say after ~3 years) has the advantage of settling/deepening the understanding of your work. Often the early years are super hectic and you try to be your best, neglecting things like mindful reflection. I believe sabbatical can help this, kind of like how sleep organizes and "cleans up" thoughts/memories. We need both the short sleep and "long" sleep.
Deleted Comment
Also, I have prepared for a potential surgery by getting botox injections in my forehead muscle. So far, my focus at work has dramatically improved: https://corticalchauvinism.com/2016/10/17/yuval-levental-aut...
https://www.amazon.com/Son-Rise-Barry-Neil-Kaufman/dp/091581...
What led me down this road is I found a study that said that people on the spectrum may have different facial features (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/children-with-autism-have-disti...). I reasoned my face looks very similar, and then realized that I experienced lots of muscle tension on my forehead.
Lots of people have been cured depending on if their ASD was caused by biological dysfunction - for example I know one who had biontidinase dysfunction so biotin supplementation cured all symptoms.
Hopefully you’ve identified the driver of your ASD and it will help you achieve your goals!
I learned to deal with my personal Aspergers but despite the social issues it caused earlier in my life deeply value the weird thinking processes it has given me.
As mentioned, I believe the driver is my facial structure. I know that normally, facial structure is not the cause of a condition, but the muscle tension on my forehead is caused by my facial structure, and I suspect that muscle tension is most likely the cause of the symptoms I face.
The link in your article no longer works (http://www.abaphysicaltherapy.com/2011/10/what-is-craniosacr...).
I really like your analytical approach to solving this, e.g. https://corticalchauvinism.com/2017/11/13/yuval-levental-cra...
Most people suffering from this condition don't have a physics background and wouldn't think to apply Hooke's law here.
I actually know quite a lot about math and science, but my major difficulty is not being able to hold down a career where I have to apply math/science (though I have difficulty staying focused at most jobs that require substantial abstract ability).
In addition to Hooke's law, I simply felt a lot of muscle tension on my forehead growing up. Because I essentially had that feeling from birth though, I didn't consciously notice it until recently.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
BTW, I am diagnosed as high-functioning, but I am not so high-functioning that I can "pass" for normal or even close to normal in public. That is starting to change though.
Dead Comment
It's all good though, I was planning to leave anyways.
Deleted Comment
I am now working on a bunch of ideas that I hope will help some people around here:
1. A Pocket-to-Kindle service that syncs (almost) instantly to your Kindle whatever article you save, formats it like a professionally edited book, cleans up ads and takes advantage of the new typesetting engine inside the new Kindle firmware.
2. A Spotify music discovery website. I'm trying to make a two-click-playlist-generator by using Spotify APIs to look at the top artists/genres of a user and create playlists on the fly with tracks that the user could like.
I use Spotify daily and found myself overwhelmed by how much music there is available. Because of that, I'm mostly listening to my saved songs, Discover Weekly/Release Radar and trying out playlists that usually have the same too popular songs.
3. An adaptive brightness/contrast app for external monitors. Adjusting brightness using the monitor's controls is always annoying to do.
4. A morning alarm that starts playing an algorithmically generated Spotify playlist each time, with fade-up volume, external speaker support, adaptive algorithm based on likes/dislikes and self-updating alarm times based on day moments (twilight, sunrise, golden hour, dusk etc.)
5. A detector for processes that eat up all your CPU and battery. I started writing this in Rust so I can make it cross-platform and learn the language at a lower level.
https://github.com/alin23/spfy is the core of that idea. If you want I can help you or your friend set it up. Or I can let you know when the finished website is ready.
Personally, I am thinking about developing an online service, which will be offerring general-purpose providing distribution of content to Kindle or other ebook-readers. Initially, I thought about creating only a app which will extract a article tag from website and create ebook from it (pandoc) or exactly a Pocket-to-Kindle. But when I was thinking more about it more ideas had come to my mind, HN-frontpage scrapper, simple notebook/orgmode adapted to Kindle Experimental Browser, markdown-files-to-ebook, arxiv-to-ebook converter, some kind of IFFTT pipeline (stream X from Y and save it as a ebook) and even trying to implement most of features known from Calibre application... If I could somehow help you as a developer or you are interested in bootstrapping some online service together I really would like to receive an e-mail from you. My e-mail address: (put my HN nickname here) at gmail.com
The number of times Pocket just either redirects to the original article, or drops salient bits of text (in particular, unordered list items) is really annoying.
Personally I use Instapaper more for reading because of all the premium features being free and keep Pocket in sync using IFTTT for their good recommendations.
I can make you an (unofficial, free) beta tester if you want. I'll have most of the basic functionality by the end of January. If you're interested let me know here: alin.p32@gmail.com
Bored Hackers https://www.boredhackers.com : a public chatroom based community site. Think of it like reddit, but chatrooms insteads of forums. I just deployed the first version a few hours ago. Bored Hackers is an experiment at building the community site that I wish existed : public chatroom based communites, pseudonymous users, transparent moderation logs, an open source code base and a site that is welcoming to non-technical users. Currently, there is a single chat room for all discussions and support for user created chat rooms will be added shortly.
Deleted Comment
why an iframe?
How do you manage to continue working on something you know is a dead end though? Is the money that good? Would the money go away if you worked on another project at the same firm?
The school is free to students until they find a job, then they contribute with a % of their salary. After only 9 months, many students find internships and jobs at companies like NASA, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, Dropbox...
It's a life-changing experience for many of our students, and it also changes the Tech industry by bringing folks with an untraditional background. Our students are straight out of high-school, some had a career before: cashier, math teacher, artist, poker player...
We have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and collaborating with their peers. We are located in San Francisco and looking forward expanding.
https://www.holbertonschool.com/education#tuition