I started taking some MOOC‘s (massively open online courses) and have really enjoyed the offerings from Coursera.org. I recently completed the Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python course from Rice which concluded with a project that involved coding a version of the old arcade game Asteroids, but with fancier graphics than the original. Although a lot of the content was provided, like all the graphics and sound effects, the coding portion was still fun and interesting.
Currently I am taking Coursera’s Startup Engineering course from Standford. The syllabus is awesome – we pull together a bunch of software tools needed to code and deploy a web startup, including Linux command line, Git, AWS, Heroku and more. There is a final project that involves coding our app in node.js and trying to get it crowd funded. The course also includes a philisophocial portion with inputs from a number of sucessful Silicon Valley startup founders plus some great background reading. Many of the tools are new to me so it is going to be a challenge but I am really enjoying it so far and hope to get my idea working and deployed.
geomark 