Now you can learn programming

Sep 212011
 

People who have heard my talk at the recent Barcamp 7 would know that my advice to any non-tech founders who wished to pick up a programming language is to…..

 

Learn whatever from anyone who’s willing to lend a helping hand.

 

In my case, the access to coaching came earlier for Ruby on Rails than for Python which is why Ruby became my choice of bling. I used the method of coach + online resources, I liked it and I would advocate it. I’ve also seen such success on a fellow non-tech founder, Clarence, for Bandwagon (he was introduced to Angular.js and coached by Tom.

 

Here’s why you need a coach:

You get answers to stupid questions, and you’re very likely not able to articulate your stupid question well enough to ask it on stackoverflow because of tech speak is slightly different from normal speech.

You get explanation for the explanation on why your code doesn’t work. Error messages can be non-intuitive to understand.

After the error messages, you get to know the solution without wanting to bang your head against the wall.

 

How do you find a coach?

I’m super stoked (so super stoked I’m about to fall off my chair, convulse and foam in the mouth) to tell you that Learnemy now does matching for programming!!!

 

I took so long to start because I was targeting the verticals with more demand. But I wondered if it will be a good idea to focus on the long-tail keywords (aka less demand, less competition) since I already have some really talented tech instructors in my database beforehand. The trigger came when I read this post about me and Learnemy where the blogger mentioned he would want to learn coding using Learnemy (although he later mentioned that he has no time now, sighs). So I thought no harm trying it out.

And the results shocked me. I realized that it’s much easier to use social media for the tech vertical, plus I’ve gotten 2 requests in a single day.

Moral of the story:

LEARN PROGRAMMING NOW! http://tech.learnemy.com/

I build Learnemy, an online marketplace that finds you the right instructors and classes in Singapore. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter    
 Posted by Elisha Tan at 2:08 am  Starting up  No Responses »  Tagged with: ,

Why I’m a founder

Aug 202011
 

That’s because I’m a self-righteous dreamer.

I believe that the world should be a certain kind of ideal, my interpretation of ideal – a world without starvation, discrimination, poverty; a world where people live their life meaningfully and to the fullest, regardless of who they worshiped.

I refuse to shrug my shoulders and say, “but that’s how the world works man”.

I might be sluggish in achieving this, but I’m gonna do this till the day I die.

I build Learnemy, an online marketplace that finds you the right instructors and classes in Singapore. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter    
 Posted by Elisha Tan at 10:24 pm  Personal, Starting up  1 Response »  Tagged with: ,

Ruby, not diamond, is my best friend

Aug 182011
 

When I sign off my emails with ‘I build Learnemy‘, I never meant for it to be a literal representative of what I do for Learnemy. But here I am, picking up ruby on rails (again). After getting grant’ed, I wanted to run through the mockups with whoever who could to understand if the product is pretty/functional enough. So I did a shout-out on my social networks, met Jason and was advised to pick up ruby on rails on the basis that a founder should know her product and my MVP is pretty minimal.

(Actually he also said that it’s worth learning programming while I’m starting up so even if Learnemy fails, I walk out with an additional skill. But I doubt I’ll want to pursue this far enough to call it a skill.)

I can’t stress how awesome it is to have a real human teaching rails by answering all my stupid and sometimes repetitive questions, and to troubleshoot my errors when I’m on the verge of banging my head against the wall.

This strategy of learning from a human + learning from videos look like it’s gonna work for the entire MVP stage. So yea, I’m coding my own MVP on rails,  design and ship it. Although I’m also toying of outsourcing tiny bits of coding work to speed time up, I’m not so sure if it’s possible or not. I shall see how things progress.

I have to confess that I really don’t have passion for programming. I appreciate the beauty of how it works and wonder why people can treat programmers like coding monkeys. (Seriously non-techies, try coding yourself.) But coding’s not something that I can get into the flow state doing so, unlike how I’m had a bad sleep last night but still up blogging at 3am. I can’t wait till the day I can focus more on marketing/community building/making a beautiful web experience when I get someone to cover the tech side. Till then, I’m gonna diy.

Shall quickly get over this hurdle, sweep some techies off their feet, get a co-founder and live happily ever after.

I build Learnemy, an online marketplace that finds you the right instructors and classes in Singapore. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter    
 Posted by Elisha Tan at 10:35 pm  Starting up  9 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,

Stanford prision study

Aug 052011
 

For a psychology buff like me, I consider the site used in the Stanford prison study as my Mecca. So I’m super excited to blog that I’ve made it there!

The building where it happened, just right behind the main quad. I’ve been to the main quad back in summer 09 and I didn’t realize it. #facepalm.

So I walked into the building and asked a student for directions, then asked a teaching assistant/prof-like person where the exact corridor was and I was shocked that I walked through the entire ‘prison’ within 10 steps. It’s freaking small. 

Compare the corridor now and the setup during the study. It looks exactly the same. How can healthy young males randomly selected to become prisoners or prison guards really become one when their ‘prison’ is tiny (only 2 rooms), blocked off by thin pieces of wood and, by all means, look fake?

The awe that I stood in while at that place was almost like a spiritual experience. The psychological dynamism that took place in that study in order to bring out that kind of results was just surreal.

Stanford prison study along with Milgram obedience experiment, are my favorite experiments of all time because of the insights that came out of it. We humans can all do monstrous things like killing or degrading someone simply because we are ordered to or because our role requires us to. If we could use these for bad deeds, like assisting Hitler’s genocide or abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, can you imagine how awesome the world can be if we use such insights for good?

Like giving Kim Jong il or the Taliban members the role of a care-giver or something along these lines so we all achieve collective good for ourselves? Awesome.

Anyway, I met a psychology student there as well. She said Zimbardo was a nasty professor to work with because he doesn’t help students. #psygossips

Been there, done that. Thank you very much.

I build Learnemy, an online marketplace that finds you the right instructors and classes in Singapore. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter    
 Posted by Elisha Tan at 11:09 pm  Personal  No Responses »  Tagged with: ,