

Steve Huffman - Teaching thousands of students to program on Udacity - zafirk
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/10/teaching-thousands-of-students-to.html

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moizsyed
I took Steve's course on Udacity, my first time doing any sort of substantial
web development. A few weeks later I met him at a YC event, used the Udacity
course as an icebreaker and now hes my boss at Hipmunk.

True story.

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danilocampos
What's it like to work with him?

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dpritchett
Wait, don't you work at Hipmunk?

[http://companies.thedailymuse.com/companies/hipmunk/people/d...](http://companies.thedailymuse.com/companies/hipmunk/people/danilo)

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BrainScraps
The plot thickens...

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smartwater
Without a response, people are going to assume come kind of deception.

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danilocampos
Or they'll just assume I'm poking fun at my buddy and fellow Huffman fanboy
Moiz.

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jonny_eh
GAE is really the perfect "my first web app" platform. It just works right out
of the box. No need to setup your environment or dependencies to get a web app
running locally, and then it's equally trivial to host it on the internet.

After learning the basics of web development using GAE, I've since moved on to
other platforms like RoR and NodeJS. But GAE still holds a special place in my
heart.

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nthitz
Any providers that have the simplicity of GAE with language support for either
RoR or Node? Heroku comes to mind, any others?

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mapleoin
There's <https://www.dotcloud.com/>

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jfarmer
Steve has been a mentor and speaker at Dev Bootcamp (<http://devbootcamp.com>)
for our last two cohorts and he's fantastic. Our students love him and he's a
kind, patient teacher.

Many of our students tell us Steve's udacity course was their first run-in
with web development.

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DaveInTucson
I took the Web Development course at Udacity too. It was probably more work
than some were expecting (especially for a 2xx-level course), but Steve's
knowledge and enthusiasm made for a great, challenging course.

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CalvinCopyright
Heh. It took me _a lot_ longer than Steve here to set up App Engine on my
current computer, and setting up XAMPP on my last computer to run a local
server took a fraction of the effort. I don't use an IDE, either; I use
Notepad++ for ALL my coding, so that's another trouble I don't have in any
case.

GAE may allow you to set up a server visible to the entire Internet, but I
think my fonder memories will be reserved for other tools.

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why-el
This is awesome. I didn't enroll in the class but I love the fact that it's
available for me as a reference.

What I specifically liked is the fact that they introduced and discussed
concepts that I won't necessarily deal with unless I happen to be working on a
high traffic app or site, which at this stage of my life (Senior student
living in a developing country) is unlikely to happen. Thank you Udacity.

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scottbartell
Steve's course is a great starting point for web development. It helped me
build <http://votersentiment.appspot.com> :)

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Alex3917
I took this course, and it was easily the best programming course I've taken.
Very well thought out and well balanced, plus everything is better on the
Udacity platform.

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albumedia
Great course, I watched a few videos as reference.

