Is this the first round of students for Perpetual Education?

First of all – I [Derek] have been teaching people to program unofficially and officially the entire time I’ve been doing this. I actually only learned to program so that I could teach my girlfriend at the time. She was a graphic designer for print and I thought she should transition to the web. She is very successful in her career! http://jenadam.com (I’d say that was a pretty good start!)

Beyond that – I teach all over the web through various mentorship programs and sites like https://stackoverflow.com/users/1399456/sheriffderek

It’s a little tricky to track because I teach people of all skill levels at all points in their careers… but MANY of them have gone on to be much better than me! haha.

The problem is — that because people all have their own learning path – and it can become a real mess… and people’s conceptual model of how this stuff works can be WILDLY different and very distorted… that it’s A LOT of work to untangle. It takes me much much longer to teach someone who has already ‘learned’ a lot of it – than it takes for me to just teach them properly.

Now – at my last job as Senior Developer at https://www.pxlagency.com/ — there were 3 other devs: 1 self-taught, 1 computer science degree, 1 boot camp graduate. They were all nice people — but it was the last straw. They all had completely different mental/conceptual models for how things worked and how to communicate about them. On top of that, the “creative” team was physically in their own office – and the two teams did not know how to communicate. We got this new intern. I trained her (she was pretty sharp) – and funny enough – she’s the main programmer there now. So, I train people all the time – on the job, because that’s kinda the role of a Senior person.

Because it’s so hard to train people when they’re all at such different points in their journey – this course is the way we’ve decided to get everyone on the same page — and the real secret – is that we have plans to build a bunch of more advanced courses.

that would only be possible with this shared foundation.
It’s also included in the tuition – so, all future classes we make on this DFTW track are a part of your tuition.
We did run a ‘beta’ program with 10 women from the local women’s group – and we learned a lot from that. Mainly – that if you give away a course for free – people will say that they want to take it… and they’ll honestly want to… but it’s a big commitment.

The course has 144 lessons (just ended up that way) – and MANY of those lessons have come from tutoring people so – everything has been tested in certain ways —
but this will be Design for The Web’s official 100% real first session.
It’ll be fun. We really care about this stuff – and making sure that you learn as much as humanly possible – at the right pace / and have the most fun / and have the most success in the job market – is our ONLY goal. So, being the ‘first’ is a huge bonus as opposed to a ‘risk.’ 😉