Dan answers some infrequently asked questions about codeschool.

The pupil size of your students - How did it vary from when they started, till when they finished their first lesson?

The pupil size? Do I say they came in wide-eyed, and busy-tailed, and keen to go? Yeah, I guess they started like that. How did it go from there? I think maybe halfway into the first lesson I could see that people hadn’t thought that it might be a little harder than they had expected, and obviously I took that as feedback that I had to slow down. So yeah, big, to small, and back to big again when we told them how much fun it is, and they noticed how much fun it is. I think they’re probably around about back now. We’re currently 4 lessons in, and everyone’s looking pretty happy again.

Why was the TEDx app a good fit for the Pro-Rails CodeSchool course.

Ah that’s interesting. It took me a while to realise there’s such a good fit between the two, but when we talked about doing the CodeSchool thing the first time, we knew we wanted to have professional features that we actually do in every application. The TEDx one was a good fit because it has some of the bread-and-butter stuff. It has an API, it has background workers, it sends emails, that kind of stuff, but it also doesn’t do too much of it. It’s around about the right size to fit over six weeks, which was really good. Otherwise, it gives us just the right amount of opportunity to show off our favourite little toys for each thing

Why would people want to take up a CodeSchool course with NetEngine and yourself?

I think it makes a lot of sense. There’s a couple of different kinds of people that I can imagine want to come to a course like this. Most of the time, I expect that they’ve come from a background in another language, and they’re looking for an opportunity to keep doing what they love, but recognizing the fact that the languages they’re been programming for the last ten years, that the job market for them is going to start declining. So I can definitely see why it would be attractive to come and learn how to do what they already know, coming from something like a Java background, in Ruby, and we’ve got a couple of guys who are doing that, which is pretty cool. Otherwise (and I don’t think I’m alone in this) a career in coding is a really good idea at this point. I think it’s going to supply plenty of jobs for the next couple of centuries.

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