January 2012
3 posts
The Building Blocks: Build a Basic Website - Class...
This is the 2nd part in a series by Rachel Balik on her experience learning to code in an online instructor led class on Matygo.
When I was a sophomore in college, my medieval literature professor suggested that I change my major from English to Computer Engineering.
“Absolutely not!” I told him. First of all, I loved English. But more importantly, I was certain that computer engineering classes...
Why learn to code? A student's perspective.
This is part of a series by Rachel Balik on her experience learning to code in an online instructor led class on Matygo.
We all look at dozens, perhaps hundreds of web pages a day. But how many of us actually know how those web pages were built? Once upon a time, you could do your job and let the technical people handle the tech stuff. Now, whatever your profession, there’s a good chance that...
Hi Nik!
Hello friends,
I would like you all to join me in warmly welcoming the talented Nikolas Laufer-Edel to team Matygo.
Nik is our first fulltime ongoing hire and we are very proud to have him. Nik started building web apps in the late 90’s but has since shifted his focus to user experience design, marketing, and product management. He is passionate about lean, metrics, thoughtful analysis,...
December 2011
2 posts
Give the gift of knowledge this Christmas - 8...
If you’re looking for a last minute gift (or gift for yourself) this Christmas what better than a Matygo course? We have eight courses ready to go in January. All taught in small groups (9 or less). Don’t buy a book that sits on a shelf - get a matygo course that goes straight to the brain!
Courses starting in January:
Programming:
Intro to HTML5 & CSS. $249. Aimed at total...
Paul interviewed on 'Lining Things Up' [podcast] →
Chad Kohalyk, a student in one of our Rails courses, recently asked if he could interview me on the topic of startups and Matygo. It turned out really well. He actually first brought this up on his blog, which includes a great screenshot of the class in action: http://sb1.tumblr.com/post/13246107460/ror-matygo
November 2011
6 posts
Last few spots in iOS/Mobile dev courses
Ever had an idea for an iPhone app? Wished you could make it a reality? Our two iOS development courses starting next week are almost full.
1 spot left - For total programming beginners. Starting on Tuesday. Mobile Development with PhoneGap
2 spots left - For experienced coders. Starts on Wednesday. iOS and Cocoa Touch
Get em while they’re hot (and before they’ve started :)).
New Course: iOS/Mobile dev for total beginners →
Are you a non-programmer who would love to be able to make a mobile app yourself? Always wanted to learn development basics? Check out our new course aimed at beginners using PhoneGap to teach development fundamental. Learn to create a real app and submit it to the App Store: http://www.matygo.com/courses/630-mobile-development-with-phonegap
Matygo in VentureBeat →
Let the games begin!
Andre Malan knows a thing or two about sexy... →
Can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier. Thanks Andre, you just made my night.
Capitalizing on a General Education →
Great article on the divide between generalist / non-technical degrees being studied by most University students and the economic/job prospects of their graduates.
But no fear, you army of BAs who wax eloquent (I am one of you). Keep your eye on Matygo. We are here to help. Get the concrete skills you need to get on the track to positions where you can actually exercise the abstract and...
October 2011
6 posts
Learn to Code. Open Neurons. Find Purpose. →
bufr:
I won’t name names, so we’ll call her Jane.
Jane’s five closest friends are two engineers at Google, an engineer at Eventbrite, an architect, and her father (which is so cute), who is the president of a national soccer team in Jane’s home country.
Jane graduated with a degree in Business…
These are exactly the type of experiences we want to play a part in creating. Great story.
“The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number...”
– Bill Gates
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/gates-tells-uw-students-billionaire-overrated
“But remember education to some degree is about motivation. If you’re motivated...”
– Bill Gates
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/gates-tells-uw-students-billionaire-overrated
First community courses!
Hey everyone,
I’ve been meaning to write a longer blog post to explain our new direction - but as often happens with ‘longer blog posts’ it’s taking… a long time ;).
So we’ve decided to start offering courses in the community on technical topics on our platform. To do the live class portion we’re integrating Google+ Hangouts which allows for live video,...
Release Notes for Thu, Oct 20th 2011.
Hey all,
We’ve been a bit silent the past few weeks but we’ve got a fair bit of stuff to share with you today that we hope you’ll enjoy. In addition to the iPad release we’ve addressed a number of performance issues, and are hard at work improving things every day.
Bug Fixes
Resolved a simple capitalization error on profiles
Resolved an issue where you were not asked...
iOS client update
Hi everyone,
My name is Farhan and I am part of the Matygo team that is working on maintaining and improving the iOS app.
Today I am happy to announce that version 1.3 is available in the App Store. The iOS app is now a universal app and works on all iOS devices.
The goal of the iPad version was to match the look and feel of the standard Matygo web app. A lot of the UI elements will feel very...
September 2011
8 posts
iPhone client update!
Hey Everyone,
I am happy to announce a service release for the Matygo iPhone client.
Features
Markdown is now supported throughout the app in the form of rich text (which includes hyperlinking / youtube / vimeo support)
All levels of the application are now refreshable by pulling the list view down (ala twitter / facebook)
General ui fixes throughout.
Thanks as always for using Matygo, next...
Matygo releases Android Client!
Hey everyone,
Today’s release includes a minor patch (of a major security issue - pointed out by Kevin Woo).
On a more exciting front, we are proud to announce the first release of the Matygo android client.
It can be found here: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.matygo.matygodroid
Please feel free to give us any and all feedback, this is our first foray into the android world,...
Release Notes for Wed, Sept 21st 2011.
Hey all,
We’ve pushed another release, with continued performance increases the initial payload has been reduced by approximately 500 kb (a lot of unused css was remove). And the following:
Bug fixes
More speed enhancements, cut out about 400 kb of unused SC js. and 300 kb of CSS
Resolved issue with greedy fetching of users
Timestamps
Resolved formatting issue where...
Release Notes for Mon, Sept 16th 2011.
Hey All,
This evening’s release includes some small bug fixes to the way discussion was working, and some performance tweaks to the general page loading.
In particular the editing of posts has been redesigned to reduce the number of DOM objects created and JS execution on a thread load, which should improve the page load for individual threads.
Additionally some tweaking has been done...
Release Notes for Friday, September 16th.
Hey all,
Some notes on today’s release:
Page Load Optimizations
Yesterday I spent the better part of the day on optimization of the page load.
On the simple side of things this means reducing the over all payload of the site. Such as:
There was a small bug that was causing some of the CSS spriting to be greedy and create excessively large sprites, this has been resolved and trimmed...
Release Notes for Wed, Sept 14th 2011.
Hello all,
Today’s release features a large number of stability improvements, and minor bug fixes, noteably:
Bug Fixes
Resolved an issue preventing markdown preview of new threads
Resolved a series of issues revolving around datetime, removed complicated date picker in favor of a simple text parser.
Resolved some issues with delete / updating labs, resources, assignments
Resolved some...
Matygo seeks M/F Visionaries, long walks on... →
August 2011
4 posts
The Gag is off: Matygo part of GrowLab
Friends and Followers,
Matygo has been accepted to the inaugural cohort of GrowLab (in fact I’m writing this in the GrowLab’s office). This is going to be a big week for us and the Vancouver tech scene generally (with GrowConf kicking off Wednesday).
As part of the program, we’re receiving an investment, office space, mentorship, press exposure, conference participation, and...
GrowLab announces startups of its 'accelerator... →
GrowLab starts today, Matygo accepted - Financial... →
July 2011
1 post
New Matygo Released! →
To all our current beta users - try the new site! It’s up and alive at https://alt.matygo.com . We’re keep www up for now, so both are running side by side, but give the new one a shot. We think you’ll like it. :)
June 2011
5 posts
More Snaziness on Darkhorse 1.3 front.
Our little visit to New York was really productive, we made a lot of connections, had some great conversations, and got to see a bit of NYC. On the flight back I was able to flesh out a large portion of the new gradebook view.
Today I just wanted to show you a few screen shots.
As you can see the new gradebook view makes extensive use of Endash’s fantastic tableview, and now supports...
Darkhorse 1.3 Preview
A lot has been going on for Matygo in the past week or two (check out the new splash page, and the new blog layout), and definitely a lot more is going on this week as we are in New York for the Venture Capital in Education Summit.
With all this business focus in the past few weeks, I wanted to reassure everyone that we are still hard at work on our core technology - the Matygo learning system...
Network Effects (or, how to make it big on the...
A network effect: when the value derived from a system increases with the number of people that use it.
I’ve been slightly obsessed with the idea of network effects lately, but for good reason: Every major internet success has been created by leveraging network effects: from email to Airbnb. A system with network effects trends towards a natural monopoly and grows virally (a new name for an...
Photo shoot Shots
Meg was in doing a little photo shoot for her portfolio yesterday, and the shots turned out so good we figured we had to post them - who would have thought Paul and I could take a decent picture.
Me looking serious-o with my card.
Paul very happy
A bit more lighthearted
Skeptical ?
Look they match!
I think they turned out really well, the shirts / new cards look...
How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at... →
Great piece combining a personal struggle and a thesis on education. James Somers uses Project Euler as an example of learning done right, and it really struck me how closely it (unintentionally) echoes the ideas in Deliberate Practice.
once you get the right answer you’re given access to a forum where successful solvers share their approaches. It’s the ideal time to pick up new...
May 2011
7 posts
Bug Squashing
A new backend, another round of students… another round of bugs uncovered!
I’m happy to say we’ve squashed a number of them in the last few days:
http://issues.matygo.com/issues/162
http://issues.matygo.com/issues/172
http://issues.matygo.com/issues/173
http://issues.matygo.com/issues/178
http://issues.matygo.com/issues/179
http://issues.matygo.com/issues/158
...
Another round of the pilot!
We’ve just pushed out our next round of the Matygo Pilot. Thanks again to Kimberly Voll (and her students) of UBC for helping us test out our software, we hope we can help you knock CS 221 out of the park this term.
.joe
Gates Foundation: The Art and Craft of Teaching →
Open Education Resources You May Not Know About →
3 tags
3 tags
Deliberate Practice: How Education Fails to... →
If you haven’t heard of Deliberate Practice yet, you should.
Office v 2.0 (now with tracked lighting)
Well it’s been exactly a year since we moved in to the dominion building. It was a wild ride, we built a lot of cool stuff in that office, played a bit of starcraft, all in all had a great time.
You know what they say, all good things…
To make room for our interns who will be joining us this summer, we moved to a new location (just around the corner - still in the heart of...
April 2011
4 posts
T-Shirts Incoming!
My lovely girlfriend (and resident Matygo designer) Meg, has provided us with a design for Matygo t-shirts V 1.0. So don’t be surprised if you see a few people roaming around Vancouver sporting these bad boys.
.joe
Work with Matygo - Internships Summer 2011 →
February 2011
3 posts
Leaving the Nest: Visiting Langara College
This morning we demo’d with five faculty members from Langara College’s CSIS department. Not only did we receive great feedback and met interesting people, this was an important milestone for us: namely, this was the first time we presented to instructors outside our home campus.
We had a great time. It’s very cool to see other people get interested in our project, giving...
Matygo, v. 1.3
The code keeps rolling. Version 1.3 went out Friday evening.
Notables:
Speed.
Joe pulled out a lot of the view logic and rewrote almost all of the renderers for our most heavily used controls. Result: Animations are *much* faster, especially on firefox where things were hurting the most. The whole app feels notably snappier.
Grading System
The grading system received a significant upgrade as...
Romancing the LTAC
We had quite the shocker on Friday. That was the day Kim (one of the instructors using the alpha) forwarded us an email she had received from the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology asking for community feedback on LMSs to replace Blackboard Vista. This meant two things:
1) UBC has decided to replace Vista (hooray!).
2) The selection process for a replacement is well underway and we...
January 2011
2 posts
Fast Iterations - 1.1 and 1.2 up
Being so early and young (and a web app) we have the advantage of being able to iterate really fast on user feedback. We’re currently practicing a form of poor-man’s continuous integration by manually pushing up to the server new code at least twice a week. Many of those are just bug fixes, but a few times a couple notable feature requests slide in and we call that a version.
...