John Moon

I’m currently learning ruby on rails at Launch Academy, a programming bootcamp. During the past 3 weeks I have been working on my breakable toy pair studying.

The idea came, prior to joining Launch Academy, when I was studying alone following Michael Hartl’s tutorial. The rails tutorial was amazing, it gave me so many great insights and a good view of what Rails is and what it can do. However, I struggled hard!!! My code would break and I couldn’t do anything about it :( I either had to start over or ignore the problem and keep going on. This happened frequently and I was not happy. The problem was that if I had someone to look over my code, they probably would have spotted my error or at least help me fix it. I found that one of the more common reasons my program would break was due to spelling errors.

With pair studying I hope to knit together an online community to help each other learn. I admit there are kinks that I have yet to be fixed. It is far from finished, but I wanted to share it with the community so that I may get feedback and learn from you and hopefully it may benefit your studying. There are many other features and UI designs I want to add.

Also, I will be graduating Launch Academy next week. Woot! I learned so much from my helpful mentors and I want to give back. I’m looking for 4 individuals who want to go through Rails Tutorial with me. We will be covering 1 to 2 chapter each week, haven’t fully decided the pace yet. The course will cost $25 that will be donated to Railsbridge, check them out if you haven’t heard about them! I’m not charging to make money, nor do I think I’m that good to be charging money. You’re paying as a way of making a commitment. I’m hoping to get serious students who really want to learn and will follow through by putting the time and effort needed to become a developer.

The process will entail students going through each chapter on their own. When they get stuck on a problem, they can share the problem on the site or possibly reach me through skype, haven’t fully decided on either. Students will be learning by helping and teaching each other solve problems. I will be there to answer questions, but really hope that the interaction amongst students will be enough to solve problems. I plan to be heavily involved in the beginning of the phase and become less and less present as a gradually releasing them into the wild (launch academy has proven to be successful). I will be spending around 2 hours each week helping with questions and just talking about the process. If you’re interested feel free to tweet me or visit my site and contact me through the form, and if you’re on reddit just pm me. Also I’m requiring my students to post at least 1 to TodayILearned on my site. Throughout my experience at Launch Academy we have daily standups. In short, it is to share what you have done, learned, or stuck on. I want everyone to share what they have learned so that others can benefit from your learning.

I’m only hitting the surface with programming and I’m very excited to have made this! Makes me proud. Thanks for reading. Feel free to share or leave me comments and I’ll answer them promply.

Work Hard and Dream Big :) John