Constructive criticism:<p>I think the video should be 100% about "what's in it for me" (the user). I understand the reason why you are introducing the people behind the project, but after 1minute in the video becomes "about howtocode.io" and less about "me". I closed the video after that to be honest.<p>Again, I get that you are providing validation and answering "why should I trust you" but honestly, unless you can say something that a beginner would value like "I founded Twitter", or "I work for Microsoft" (used to illustrate people can relate to a brand name regardless of how our inner-circles perceive them.) then it becomes a waste of the 30 seconds I'm giving you as to what's in it for me and how can I start receiving value RIGHT NOW.<p>In writing this, actually I think most everyone that has asked me for advice in how to code vet sites by word of mouth and by proxy i.e. "Jade what do you think about this site?" or "well Google has it as #1" or "well on youtube this has 1 million views" etc.<p>So in summary, I think you should not _lead_ with vetting yourself.<p>EDIT: I watched more of the video. You use language like "we will teach you.." and "our goal is to" which illustrates the point that you are talking about yourselves rather then the user. Changing it to "You will build a basic webpage and host it online entirely yourself in the first week" shifts the subject to the user, because it's always all about the user.
I love the efforts to build these types of resources, I just hope this isn't redundant with Michael Hartl's tutorial.<p>Also, I'm not a believer in TDD, especially with beginners. I find it tedious especially when prototyping an app, which I almost always do before starting a non-trivial project. Once my prototype works reasonably well, I do a refactor with good test coverage in an effort to produce production ready code.<p>I'm a huge believer in testing, just not TDD.
What I'd like would be a 'From Novice to Employable using Clojure'<p>I've heard some nice things about Ruby, but I think I'm too much of a spoiled noob in my exposure to Clojure. I'd even take a class if it was Scala or Erlang or something along those lines.<p>Sometimes I hate being a spoiled noob, because I'd really like a job programming, but I don't want to pause learning Clojure unless I'm learning some language that seems to be at least close to it. But trying to get a job whene you can build stuff in Clojure but not much else (I've done a little in Python too, and did enjoy that a bit) is a tough task. Or at least it has been for me up to this point. Virtually everyone wants some veteran Java or Python hacker who's also got Clojure chops.<p>A job in Clojure centric web development...is it too much to ask?
As a recent novice-to-employed developer myself, I would caution against jumping into the rails stack. This is not a knock on rails, however. Where I live (Michigan, US) there are plenty of web dev job openings at any given time. But about 50% are C# MVC or ASP.net, another 25% are PHP drupal or wordpress and then come Django, Rails and the rare node job.<p>My point is if "employable" is the goal, check out the jobs listed on stackoverflow and indeed, etc., in your area before picking a learning plan.<p>(Incidentally, I learned Java/Android and Python and count myself very lucky to be employed in non-web dev.)
I'd like to see things like some hours of face-to-face mentoring per week (via skype or hangouts) and extra exercises and reviews in the Premium plans. There are almost no online resources providing such features, and I find them extremely important when teaching to beginners as I explained in a recent post: <a href="http://bit.ly/HjiCpm" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/HjiCpm</a>
Currently this is the big thing on the Internet. Teaching people how to code.<p>I really believe "Knowledge empowers the person". So keep up the good work guys! The more learning experiences out there the better knowledgable about the Internet, web technologies for the public.
Meanwhile, while you're waiting for users to fully build out the content I can head to General Assembly or CodeSchool or CodeAcademy or Lynda or any other site.<p>Just sayin, don't underestimate the person who wants to learn now, not wait.