proud n00b

Editing online courses like modern browser development

After watching the first videos released for Stanford’s AI Course, it is clear the course is still quite rough. Traditional problems both in Academia & online courses are pervasive throughout the short clips. However by just following modern browser development, like Google Chrome’s release strategy,  I think the AI course can remedy most of these issues.

Here are the problems as I see them : 

• Some people will think a non-native English speaker is hard to understand
• The video quality & editing wasn’t very sharp
• The experience wasn’t fluid - ex. the quizzes did not auto-progress after the right answers were submitted

These are bugs that are definitely easy to overcome - and that is where the 100k+ students can help. We should be able to help contribute towards the content - like browser testers already do with Chrome. Instead of releasing one final version of the course, Stanford should release the unedited video & let the community help test & polish it.

Following the Google Chrome analogy:

• Canary - the unedited film
• Dev - A crowd-sourced, edited version (better audio?)
• Beta - A bit of polish, editing, and effects added 
• Stable - Final version intended for public consumption

This would alleviate much of the burden from Stanford on editing the course material while also producing a more polished end-result. 

What do you guys think?

Why do tickets to tech company conferences cost so much? (f8 - $400, WWDC- $1,599)

F8 was just announced, and the tickets are priced at $400 a pop. I don’t know about you guys, but for an individual developer (who would love to go), $400 is crazy money. Why do tech company conferences cost so much?!?

Facebook is charging the people who expand their ecosystem to attend an event which will result in Facebook growing further. This doesn’t make sense to me. I understand they want to cover their costs, but I have personally spent more than $400 of my time digging through their documentation & hacking on their APIs.

Tech events like this should be free. Facebook should want every developer to come to f8 for networking, learning more about the platform, and getting developers’ creative juices flowing. By charging so much, you limit who attends, and therefore directly hinder Facebook’s potential growth as a platform.

Yes this is a bit of ranting and raving, but I think the high costs of these events is a real problem. These events should be free for the people who create more value for these companies. Why don’t they understand that and reciprocate the favor? (Apple I’m also looking at you.)

Google+ Study Hall #idea

Recently I became interested in Google+ Hangouts as a platform - tons of uses for a group video chat. Tonight, I had one idea that seems really easy & useful for procrastinators.

Google+ Hangout Study Hall. 

Join the group, put your audio on mute, and learn whatever you need to learn. Maybe someone else in the room can help out when you have a question - but the core is to get people together at a set time, for a set period of time, to just learn. People do this for their fitness so why shouldn’t we do it for self-learning? 

If you are interested in finding a few hours a week for a hangout, just leave a comment. Maybe people aren’t that interested - but I think the peer pressure created by a Google+ Hangout could be effective in getting people to finally learn that thing you’ve put off for years or months.

What do you guys think?

How to install the Facebook Like Button

Instead of pointing the like button at your domain, point it to your Facebook Page. 

With Housefed, I set up the Like Button to http://housefed.com. The problem this presents is your Facebook page will then have a different number of likes from your website. Therefore your social credibility within Facebook is different than your website.

To kill two birds with one stone- put a Fb Like Button to your Facebook Page on your site. When your users click it, it will give you the social credibility you want on your site, and, at the same time, your Fb Page.

My mistake cost me over 230 Facebook Likes - from 243 to my URL, down to 7 for my Fb Page. Hopefully this will help others avoid my mistake!