I have some important news about the course that I’m very excited to share with you: we have a brand new TA! It took three weeks of searching and interviews with 14 different candidates, but in the end I found the perfect person for this role. I’m thrilled to introduce you to Ian Schoonover who will be helping out on the discussion boards and chatrooms starting immediately.
I first met Ian a few years ago when he was a student in one of my back-end development evening courses. He’s a natural teacher. Even before he graduated the class he was already spending time helping other students debug their code. He subsequently TA’d for me at General Assembly, and most recently he worked with me at Galvanize in San Francisco. He’s a great guy who has both worked as a developer and a teacher. He knows this material front and back and has lots of experience helping new developers debug and improve code. We are very lucky to have him on the team!
It’s very important to me that this course has an active community around it. I have seen many online courses that offer zero student support and basically leave students to fend for themselves. I do not want this course to work that way. I know that the difference between waiting a few hours to get help and waiting a few days for help can often be the difference between continuing to learn and giving up on programming all together. Obviously we cannot guarantee the on-demand assistance of an in-person course, but we are going to do our best to make sure no one waits very long to get help.
We are so fortunate to already have a great community centered around this course, and it’s only going to get better and better with the hiring of Ian. I highly encourage you to make the most of this awesome community if you are not already. Here are a few different ways I hope you can participate:
See you out there!
Colt