Paying it Forward: Teaching Family to Code

Nick Gurney — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 22:41:37 +0000

I have been "learning to code" for about 2 years. Check out the skills on my profile and you'll see that clearly, I am not where I should be.

While many aspiring developers can go from Hello World to a full-time gig in 3-6 months I am over here trying to remember if it is Console.write or Console.Write() and hoping I can get in an hour of programming a week, much less an hour per day.

I was at a loss of what to do. I was working 40 hours a week, going to Uni full time, and attempting to keep up with This is Us on Netflix. Clearly no time to code, right? Well, I found that I always found some time, because I loved to do it, but how can I keep some consistency?

So one day my 16-year-old brother-in-law and I were chatting about learning together and building stuff together so that we can really internalize the things we were learning, which is when the 💡 moment came.

Let's build an entire dev team out of our extended family!

My wife has around 50 cousins aged between 1 and 25, so we had no shortage of participants. I jumped in our family group chat and had a huge response (let's be real, who doesn't want to learn to code in 2018?).

So this is our process:

Meet every 2 weeks for about 2 hours
Collaborate between meetings using Slack and Notion
Learn individually every day using freeCodeCamp and other resources
Build, build, build

We have now met twice and have 12 participants. I have coded every single day since we started and have been more motivated than ever.

I am excited to continue to share this journey with you, help me out by answering one of the questions below!

What fun activities can we do as a group during our meetings?
What other free resources can we use in addition to freeCodeCamp?
What are some fun projects we can build together?

DEV Community: Nick Gurney

Paying it Forward: Teaching Family to Code