Paying it Forward: Teaching Family to Code

Nicholas Gurney Sep 14

#beginners #career #inspiring

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?

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DISCUSSION (11)

Nicholas Gurney

Hi Everyone! 👋🏼 My name is Nick, I am a product manager from Provo, Utah. I have joined dev.to in the hopes of cultivating my desire to be a developer. Feel free to reach out––I'd love to chat!

Justin Beall

Sep 15

Have you tried mob programming basic katas together? It is a great way to start building up skills individually, while crushing problems as a group.
youtu.be/SHOVVnRB4h0

Once you get good at that, then you can start following tutorials about hosting applications and building cool things together.

Nicholas Gurney

Sep 15

This sounds fantastic! I’ll make note of it as something we can do together.

Thanks for the support!

Justin Beall

Sep 15

We do this remotely at Skiplist. If you would like some guidance or pointers, feel free to find me on LinkedIn.
Not making promises, but I am working with my brother on building his programming muscles. Tomorrow morning, we will pair for 1-2 hours working on a small paying project. We could setup a time and could give my two cents on how to conduct a session and/or training programmers.

THREAD

Nicholas Gurney

Sep 15

I’d love that, I really appreciate it. I’ll make note and reach out when I can.

Ruth Reyer

Sep 15

What a charming idea. I do hope you continue writing on the experience!

Ben Halpern

Sep 15

Ha! This looks like a lot of fun!

Nicholas Gurney

Sep 15

Thanks Ben! I’ll make sure to keep posting about it on the community.

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Nick Karnik

Sep 15

That's so cool! You could all play planning poker, lol!

Run it like an organization and build a real product. Might need to find something everyone likes.

Nicholas Gurney

Sep 15

Yeah we’ve had a lot of talks about doing this! There is a lot you can do with 10 devs, even if they are all new!

Ruth Reyer

Sep 15

I love this book by Jon Duckett, javascriptbook.com/. It's been absolutely instrumental in my learning. Perhaps you could all use it as a study program of sorts.