About Jumpstart Lab

• What makes these courses different?
• Who are the Instructors?
• What is Great, Guaranteed?
• How does the pricing work?
• What are the requirements to participate?

What makes these courses different?

Where a traditional class is one broadcasting voice and many listeners, these courses are built on a peer-to-peer model. Our small groups, limited to just 20 people, can quickly build a friendly community where we push each other to break down complex problems, develop creative solutions, and build lasting skills.

How often have you read something interesting, then forgotten all about it in a few hours or days? Reading just isn’t enough. Listening isn’t much better. To understand something you need to do it.

Jumping in by yourself isn’t the answer.

This stuff can be hard, complex, and frustrating! Any technologist can tell you stories about times they searched and searched for a bug, wasted hours or days tracking down a problem, and in the end it turned out to be right in front of their face the whole time.

As novices in any endeavor, the first challenge is to build your confidence. Often simple mistakes, sitting right in front of your face and obvious to any person with experience, can be so frustrating that they derail you. Instead of taking steps towards mastery you throw up your hands and give up.

But not together. In the open source world there’s a saying called Linus’ Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” That’s why we work together — with multiple brains, multiple perspectives, all challenges are simple.

So why not just grab a few friends and learn it all on your own? You probably could. With enough determination you could climb Everest on your own, too, but an experienced trail guide would increase your chance of success. Ruby is an awesome language because it allows you to start with the most fundamental element of a computer program: a single instruction.

puts “Hello, World!”

That’s a computer program, technically speaking. Ready to take on Microsoft? Not quite. But after typing those few characters into an Interactive Ruby (IRB) shell, you’ve done something impressive. You have created something. You told the computer what to do, then you made it do it. Computers are VERY STUPID! They can’t do anything until someone tells them what to do. And that someone can be you.

• If you have no background in Computer Science, you’ll want to start with the Ruby Jumpstart. You’ll learn about the fundamentals of programming computers and build some cool projects along the way.
• If you have some experience programming and are interested in developing apps for the web, check out the Rails Jumpstart.
• Want to learn the basics of building and accessing a database like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle? You need to know the SQL language — try out SQL Jumpstart.
• And if you’re a budding social media magnate, try the Facebook Jumpstart.