Hey friends,
I have helped to build LaunchCode, a nonprofit startup, which teaches thousands of people coding in-person and places them into coding jobs. We have innovated ways give this service to people for free and help hundreds of unemployed people get coding jobs. We have grown the organization to national scale, got praised by President Obama, and won MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge.
I am currently working on a new MIT-spinoff startup Mediate, which is developing computer vision solutions for the visually impaired and the blind. (Our first app will be available in iPhones in the next few months).
While working on my new startup, I have met more and more people with visual disabilities and started thinking about whether I can use my experiences from LaunchCode to help the visually impaired and blind community learn coding and get tech jobs.
I was wondering about whether there are already some programs that help someone with visual impairments or blindness learn coding enough to get a tech job. I am sure many people here have thoughts about this. I would love to hear their feedback and suggestions.
If anyone wants to explore this idea together, I would also love to band together.
Looking forward to hearing your responses.
- Emre
Comments
Thanks so much!
Thanks so much!
Don't do it unless you truly love it
To put it bluntly, Programming is really hard at first. If you don't make it fun for yourself, you won't stick with it. I suggest thinking of something you want to build and then figuring out what you'll need to learn in order to realize your creative vision. A great first project is a simple homepage that has your name, photo, short biography and links to your favorite artists, movies, websites or whatever else you want to share. This will introduce you to the basics of web design and HTML and you can keep adding to it, making it more sophisticated as you continue to learn more.
This exercise will also help you make sure development is really for you, because as glamorous a field as it might sound, it is not for everyone, and that's why developers generally earn high salaries. Not everyone has the patience, determination, analytical and critical thinking skills to be great at it, but if you have the core ingredients and are willing to put in the work to learn it, it will be such a fun and rewarding path for you!
Do simpler.
Start to study wordPress.
And you will create your first good web page.
And very important:
Make what you really need.
Id est, Make a necessary useful web page for you and your friends.
And step by step add some useful information.
Coding is not a self-purpose. It's useless for you.
It is your necessary and informative work as a result.
It was my opinion.
But it doesn't mean it is a right opinion.
Cheers!