Uncle and .us – Experiment in Learning Together

adminraju on May 1, 2020

Starting today, I and four more folks will be committing four months of our time to get better with programming, especially at Web Application development. Our goal is to complete 3 courses between May-August 2020


https://uncleand.us

Goal

Our goal is to complete following 3 courses between May – August 2020.

  • Learn Linux Fundamentals
  • Get certified with AWS. We will be starting with AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.
  • Complete the Full Stack Open 2020 course – This is the most important (& mandatory) course as part of this challenge!
  • (Optional & Stretched goal) – Completion of Data Science Course

So What’s the Criteria for Calling it a success?

I’m glad you asked. Since we are going on long journey ( 4 months) together, we’ve decided to do following things to help us stay focused and track our progress through out these months.

  1. Weekly Meetups (via Web Conference as we all are over the places). These hour long meetups will help us to ask questions to each other and ask for help if needed.
  2. Every week all work / assignments one worked on should be uploaded to GitHub.
  3. Write at least one blog post per week that talks about problem we solved, things we learned as Individual as part of this course or totally outside, but worth sharing. (At the end of this post, you will be introduced to these four participants and blogs that they will be using.)
  4. If course offers certificate, then we should earn it at the end.

That’s pretty much it is. If all four participants are up for rewards for completion of this learning experience, then they needs to qualify for the same as mentioned below.

Rewards

  • Each participant will earn $50 after completion of each course.
  • Each participant will earn $50 each if all participants successfully completes this challenge. We highly encourage helping each others to complete the work. Only one condition, don’t copy and paste the code please. Honesty rules!
  • $100 per participant if they use these newly acquired skills to solve real world problem that they have faced or their friends and families. Here are few starter ideas:
    • Starter Idea # 1 – Creating a WordPress (or any other platform that they like) website theme to show case skills and work they completed so far. Here few developer blogs that they can use as inspiration to develop their website:
    • Other option is contribution to any Open Source Project.
      • Beginner Starter Idea – Writing a extractor for Youtube-dl @ GitHub for any website that is not yet listed there.
      • Advance Starter Idea – Understand how websites such as https://indiacovid19.github.io/ and https://ncov2019.live/ aggregate data from different sources all over the internet and publish data in visual format. Later suggest or enhance these website with at least one new useful feature.

So Are you ready to get Introduced to Actors?

  1. Uncle – That’s me! You earn this nick name in India as you start growing grey hairs. Sadly I’m at that phase and there is no point of return

    I also happen to be sponsoring this whole experience, yes all that money will be going out of my pocket. And I will be very happy to part with money as returns are so high,as I strongly believe this exercise will give my buddies a confidence to fight with Imposter Syndrome

    So without further ado, let me introduce you to my buddies aka participants in not any particular order:
  2. Sam – Sam wise is very smart kid that I’ve came across! Very hands on person. I’m very confident that the will complete all these courses and go beyond. So if you want to bet on, that will be Sam! He will be live at https://sam.uncleand.us
  3. Gaurav – The cool kid! He is the one who keeps calm and keeps doing what he suppose to. You can reach him at https://gaurav.uncleand.us
  4. Avik – Very energetic and confident bro! You can call him the Dark Horse among all. So watch out for him at https://avik.uncleand.us
  5. Atharva – This guy is the reason we all are here in first place! It all started over the last summer when he and other participants hang out with us for a few days. So if you like to blame him or curious to track his progress; he will be blogging at https://atharva.uncleand.us

Final Thoughts (and a Kicker)

We all are going to give our best to achieve these lofty goals and help ourselves to become a better skilled person who can then contribute rather becoming a just Armchair Quarterback!

Okay so what if these participants didn’t rise to occasion? What if they didn’t even give a try and surrender without putting any efforts or in a worst case scenario, ignore me? Well in such scenario, all this reward money will be giving to individuals whom they dislike the most! So guys if you are on their nerve list, congratulations; you will receive a 3 digit check if we all agree that participants were short on efforts. That being said I’m very confident, that all of us will stick to plan and put our best efforts forward!

Sam, Gaurav, Avik and Atharva; May the Force be with you! Good luck!!