The Matygo Blog

The Building Blocks: Build a Basic Website - Class 1

nikdotca — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:55:37 -0500

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 would be laborious, boring and miles over my head.

When I signed on to my first Matygo class “Build a Basic Website” I was sincerely hoping that would not turn out to be the case. Fortunately, as soon as the class began, I realized the it would embody everything was good about college, while leaving out everything that was bad.

The Good Stuff:

Intellectual environment. Everyone in the class came with curiosity and drive.
Like-minded people. We went around the “room” and each student said why he or she had taken the class. It was amazing to hear how each student planned to use coding skills to further professional goals - whether it was improving performance at the office or building a website.
Homework. I know, homework doesn’t always sound like fun, but especially when it comes to new skill building, practice makes perfect. I was glad to hear that we were going to have problem sets, and go over them in class to make sure we understood.
Knowledgeable teachers. Our two teachers, Andrei and Paul, both had strong but different backgrounds in programming and were prepared to share their knowledge and experience.

The Bad Stuff That Wasn’t There:

A strict curriculum with no flexibility. Paul and Andrei told us that the course could be modified to meet the needs of class. If we were confused, they’d slow down and if we were killing it, they’d add material.
Grades. Yes, we have to do homework, but we’ll have the opportunity to go over it with classmates rather than angst over getting things wrong.
Too cool for school professors. Remember how hard it was in college to get a hold of a professor if you had questions? Paul and Andrei gave us multiple ways to contact them - including their personal email addresses.

Our first class was devoted to meeting each other through video icons and watching slides describing the curriculum. We were told to download tutorials and get started on our out-of-class work. Our assignment for the next week is to “Play with Code.” Somehow, this actually sounds like it might be fun.

Why learn to code? A student's perspective.

nikdotca — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:32:00 -0500

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 you’ll be called upon understand a bit about how websites are built - and more importantly - how they can be made better.

In other words, web technology is not just for technical people anymore. It’s time for everybody to learn HTML.

If you’re like me, perhaps you’re thinking, “I already work full time as a writer [or marketer, analyst, dog walker, etc.] I don’t have time to learn how to do someone else’s job as well!”

Of course you don’t. And that is where the benefit of an online education comes in. With just one hour of class time per week (plus homework) you can walk away with a skill set that will make you better at your current job, and more marketable in the future.

Start the journey to the right side of your brain with HTML5 and CSS for beginners. It’s taught by Andrei Pop, a self-taught programmer who started his own web development company while still in university. Andrei’s worked with a variety of clients both locally and internationally from non-profits to fortune 500 companies.

Andrei’s favorite part of teaching is when you have that “a-ha” moment, and thanks to small class sizes and interactive, live video classrooms, he’ll make sure you have plenty of them. He makes a point of paying close attention to the needs of each student and adapting as necessary.

Online classes start Tuesday, January 24th at 7pm. If you’re interested but not ready to commit just yet get notified by email for the next class. You can also follow my experience in the class on this blog, or check out other online classes that might be of interest.

Post written by Rachel Balik.

Hi Nik!

paulitex — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:17:00 -0500

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, and design - bringing a complimentary yet compatible perspective to my own and Joe’s.

You can learn more about Nik at his personal website: nik.ca

Expect to hear from the man himself soon. Welcome Nik :)

Give the gift of knowledge this Christmas - 8 courses in January

paulitex — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:10:00 -0500

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 beginners, explains the fundamentals of front-end web development, useful to anyone wanting to build on the Web - from bloggers to entrepreneurs.

Fundamentals of Programming. $199. If HTML5 & CSS is the practical foundational course, this is the theoretical. Together, they form a solid base from which you can take Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and other programming courses. Learn the fundamentals of programming - applicable to any language - and how programs can be used to solve problems.
Ruby on Rails for Beginners. $249. This course was a huge hit last time, but don’t take our word for it, here’s what one student had to say .
Ruby on Rails for Programmers. $249. Similar to the beginner class, but aimed at people who already have a background in programming.
iOS for Programmers. $249. Our intro to iOS and Objective-C courses aimed at programmers with some background in C but no Cocoa Touch experience. Taught by great iOS developer, Richard Moore.

Graphic Design:

Adobe Photoshop. $299. Learn how to make magic with Photoshop. Taught by East Side Game’s art supervisor, Tyler Higgs.
Adobe Illustrator. $299. Name says it all - get to know the most powerful vector graphics tools out there. Taught by Graphic Designer Meg Robichaud.

Paul interviewed on 'Lining Things Up' [podcast]

paulitex — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:13:00 -0500

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

Last few spots in iOS/Mobile dev courses

paulitex — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:34:43 -0500

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

paulitex — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:38:16 -0500

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

paulitex — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:49:35 -0400

Matygo in VentureBeat:

Let the games begin!

Matygo Bucks! We know you want some.

paulitex — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 05:11:31 -0400

Matygo Bucks!

We know you want some.

Andre Malan knows a thing or two about sexy websites

paulitex — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 01:39:42 -0400

Andre Malan knows a thing or two about sexy websites:

Can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier. Thanks Andre, you just made my night.

Capitalizing on a General Education

paulitex — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:10:53 -0400

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 holistic thing your big brains have been trained to do.

Learn to Code. Open Neurons. Find Purpose.

paulitex — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:20:19 -0400

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 of people in abject..."

paulitex — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:03:12 -0400

“The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low. Innovation means it will continue to go down. I do think in most problems time is on our side. Absolutely right there are some big fortunes and it’s not good to have a society where you don’t have mobility between different income levels. Education ought to be good enough to move between them. Maybe self-serving, but I wouldn’t say it’s because a few people are very rich, I’d say it’s because we aren’t doing a good enough job on education.”

- 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 to learn physics,..."

paulitex — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:01:00 -0400

“But remember education to some degree is about motivation. If you’re motivated to learn physics, read Feynman’s book. Education is not about the unique availability of information, it’s about curating info into a form that student chooses to ingest.”

- Bill Gates

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/gates-tells-uw-students-billionaire-overrated

First community courses!

paulitex — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:11:16 -0400

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, screensharing, and document collaboration. It’s a pretty cool experience.

We have announced two courses, starting next week. The first is “Learn to build a sexy website”, which explains the fundamentals of web development and uses Wordpress as an example project which you customize and learn from. The second is “Beginner Rails”, targeted at beginners who want to learn the basics of Rails and be able to put together a simple web app.

They are both listed on our home page: http://www.matygo.com

The Wordpress course is already full and there is only 1 spot left in the Rails course.

Look for more to come!

Release Notes for Thu, Oct 20th 2011.

joegaudet — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:47:19 -0400

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 to confirm navigation when using the breadcrumb view
Resolved an issue where users would be notified of their own activities (ie: posting to discussion)

Features

Added new table sorting for grades which is significantly faster as well as allows for sorting on multiple columns
Added dynamic titles for various application states (making the back button more sane)
Added syntax highlighting for code blocks
Updated look and utility of notification e-mails (they now send in html and link back to the application)
Added a view to allow instructors / assistants to manage student ids (needed for bulk uploading of grades)
Added the ability for instructors to bulk input grades
Added a code block of sorts (technically it’s a code span - and thus doesn’t allow empty lines, this is being worked on but is a reasonable stop gap)

// Note currently empty line will break the code formatting
 public static void main(String[] args){
    Foo foo = new Foo();
    foo.bar();
}

Improved the location of the formatting buttons
Improved the insert from the formatting buttons to be at the caret location and to have pre-highlighted the inserted helping text
Added google +1s to discussion posts (eventually everything)

Thanks as always for baring with us as we shake all this stuff out, your feedback has been essential in improving the stability and utility of Matygo.

.joe (and the whole team)

iOS client update

farhanpatel — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:05:46 -0400

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 familiar.

Features

iPad support
Profile viewing
More Markdown support
General UI fixes throughout

As usual there is still a lot more planned in the pipeline so stay tuned. If there are any questions or concerns I would be glad to address them.

-Farhan (farhan@matygo.com)

iPhone client update!

joegaudet — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:54:15 -0400

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 on the iOS docket is iPad support, so stay tuned!

.joe (and the matygo team, especially farhan@matygo.com)

Matygo releases Android Client!

joegaudet — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:52:41 -0400

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, we will be grateful for your input and help to make the client fantastic.

.joe (and the matygo team)

Matygo shows meteoric growth on iOS! (not even totally sure what...

paulitex — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:55:52 -0400

Matygo shows meteoric growth on iOS! (not even totally sure what that +30,400% means, but - awesome :)).