2012: The Year of Online Learning.

If you have been an avid reader of Hacker News these past few months, you would have noticed a host of startups launching around the idea of teaching learning to an everyday person. Codecademy was one of the first out of the stable. The people of Codecademy introduced many of us to the world of Javascript for the first time. I was overjoyed about Codecademy but eventually realised from their usability that it was intended at a reasonably computer literate user. Their problem was that the forgiveness that they employed when teaching the programming novices was not very intuitive. I dont consider myself to be the dumbest guy out there but i was befuddled by the fact that their UI was not responding to an answer that was right but not in the way they had instructed us to code. Still they are getting there slowly, CodeYear was a great way of pushing ahead[1].

At around the same time, the Stanford online classes started off. Prof. Thurn who started the  ’Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class’ gave up his tenure at Stanford and started a new online university called Udacity. I was not very interested in the first session but now i have enrolled for a class[2]. Lets see how that goes. MIT also decided to jump onto the bandwagon.

Then the trickle turned into a torrent which flooded the internet. Some of the websites i came across include

Ruby: Rubymonk, TeamTreehouse, tryBloc, tryRuby, RubyLearning
Clojure: tryClojure
Web Design/Development: TeamTreehouse, Codepupil.
Design: Method of Action

I also came across these two Reddit pages filled with resources. And last but not the least, I love the work Salman Khan is doing with his Khan Academy.

If you know of any interesting learning resources, do let me know in the comments below and i shall update this post.

Footnotes:

1.  Codecademy recently started out CodeYear to get more people to start learning. NYC Mayor Bloomberg is one among the many who has vouched to code this year.
2. I have signed on for the ‘Human Computer Interaction‘ class which will start on 30th January 2012. Check out the entire Winter semester course list here.

Greekalicious

Some people consider me as an ideal example of a person who lives to eat. I love hogging out every now and then and my bank balance will tell you the story.

Way back in College, Way back when we started watching Highway on My Plate.. i had this dream of having a job of travelling and reviewing food. Man vs Food introduced us to food challenges. What a life i thought, even though it had its own pitfalls health wise. But nevertheless everyone has a dream job and this is one of mine.

I’ve been in Chennai for the past one year and i’ve been loving the food here. When me and my friends initially got placed in TCS and booked our tickets to Chennai, our friends and relatives were apprehensive about the food in Chennai. They talked about stereotyped food everywhere and this scared us a bit. But surprise, surprise..our gastronomical journey so far has been awesome. True there have been ups and downs but generally i’ve had some really good food. It helped that i have a group of friends who love to eat as well. In the past one year, i’ve eaten at more than 60 restaurants in Chennai and my Burrp! profile is proof of that We also had this little side project titles ‘ Experiments and Food ’ going for sometime until it became too tough to gather pictures and upload them to one place.

Now the fun part came when Burrp! emailed me and asked me if i was interested in reviewing Azulia, where a Greek food festival was taking place. THIS was BIG! I was so surprised!! The email said that i could take a friend so i called up @Nievu as she’s accompanied me to most of the restaurants and also because she could offer a vegetarian perspective to the food.

So the date was set, 11th November was the night and boy was it fun. Except for the part where we paid 400 for the cab to drop us back, the night was epic! Wish i could take part in more such free food… erm Food Reviews.

FYI: You can read the Review here.

Food for the Soul

The Wine..hic

The Mezze

Yeros

Pastitsio

Chef Ethem Aydemir

*Burrrrrp*

F14 >> F16

9 months, our gestation period, we spent at F14. Easily they are some of the best days of my life. Had the best room mates i could ask for. In February i was glad that we moved to a more spacious place than our erstwhile S2. F14 was a big upgrade from our previous place; a fully furnished 2 BHK. It was part of the trio of flats that the 12 of us had bought. Life was good.

Then the transfers started. The first flat was left within a month as the rent was unaffordable for 2 people to handle. The girls left F12.

Fast forward to October 2011. Karthik and Raison left the company for greener pastures and Rathan got transfered to Bangalore. That left me as the last man standing at F14. With Girish gone, Ive now moved to F16; the last flat of the three we had.

 

Dont Give Up!

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to finish songs because they don’t think they’re any good. Well they’re not good enough. Write it!  I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won’t write bad songs. You’re thinking they’re bad so you don’t have to finish it. That’s what I really think it is. Well it’s all right. Well, how do you know? It’s not done!”

- John Mayer

Sources: Berklee Blogs The Hacker News article and the page.