

Show HN: Udacity really did teach me to build a search engine - ecmendenhall
http://davedavefind.appspot.com/

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ecmendenhall
I'm a novice Python programmer who just finished Udacity's CS101 course. I had
a little Python knowledge going in, but no computer science background. (For
instance, I knew how to use a dictionary, but had no idea that dictionaries
work well because they use hash tables). Udacity promised to teach me to build
a search engine in seven weeks, and sure enough, I did! I'm entering this very
simple search engine in an end-of-class contest.

We never actually implemented the search engine code we wrote in class, but I
did learn the basics of how a crawler, graph, and index work. More important,
I learned a lot about how to solve big programming problems from the Udacity
format of short videos plus immediate experimentation. I'm amazed that I got
this project to work, but it was really just a matter of breaking big problems
into small steps, reading documentation, and asking for help when I got stuck.

I'm excited for the next round of classes, impressed at how much I learned,
and optimistic about new models for online education.

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jjNford
Awesome and congrats! Great job.

