This is a guest post written by HackerYou Web Development course graduate, Amad Mian. Check out the responsive website he created during the course here, and find him on Twitter -he's @amad. Some things I learned at HackerYou:
- Going to class can be fun - no, really!
- There’s more to a website than text
- HTML 5 is ugly, but CSS3 will make anything sexy
- Having mentors helps
- Anyone can make an awesome website
In December, I graduated from HackerYou’s fall course in HTML 5, CSS3 and responsive design. Having had no previous knowledge of HTML or CSS, coding a beautiful responsive website seemed like an impossible task. Thankfully, the team behind HackerYou makes sure you don’t feel alone or lost in a spiral of HTML tags. Taking HackerYou's web development and responsive design course was an amazing experience. The class is small, the people are great and the material is really advanced but still easy to follow. The skills we learn and the stuff we build is complex enough to wow your average person and even some veterans of the trade. Wes Bos, who leads the 12-week program, has created material that is easy to follow and up-to-date with the latest trends. He also gives us helpful insight and hints along the way while also pushing us to achieve more on our own. The balance of teaching and practical assignments gave us the right skill set to create really cool websites and taught us useful tricks of the trade.
HackerYou students also have the chance to attend all of HackerYou's excellent workshops (for free!) as an added benefit of joining one of HackerYou's three-month courses. During the three-month course, I attended quite a few unique and high quality workshops led by extremely talented people. Workshops have ranged from startup marketing with April Dunford of Rocketscope to learning UI/UX design with Ricardo Vasquez of 500px. There are usually multiple workshops scheduled per week!
Since "graduating" from HackerYou, I've started noticing aspects of websites that I would have previously be oblivious to. Mentally, I automatically start chopping websites into different sections like the body, wrapper, sidebar, header, footer and can also pick out different elements of CSS that would achieve certain design attributes. The course has changed my perspective in terms of the work that goes into building beautiful websites.
Taking this course was a great decision - there aren’t many places where you get to meet such amazing people and learn these invaluable skills in a hands-on way. I can now confidently create beautiful responsive websites. Heather and the team behind HackerYou have really put together an excellent course with a phenomenal instructor and mentors. I’d like to sincerely thank the team for bringing this course to life, it was exactly what I was looking for and more.