In this post we share some great courses to help you get started on boosting or changing your career.
Monday blues lasting all the way to Friday? It might be a sign your working life could do with a little help. Whether you’re after a new career or new skills to help with a promotion, we’ve got courses to help.
If you’re feeling bored or unfulfilled by your current role, maybe it’s time to get a taste of a different field entirely.
With healthcare across the world creaking under the strain of growing problems including dementia and obesity, the hunt is on for ways to relieve the pressure. Could technology be such a way? Here’s three examples which seem to be proving their worth in healthcare.
Fitbit
Fitbit creates wireless wearable health devices that generally resemble a watch or bracelet. Their devices track heart rate, exercise, sleep, restlessness – all things that previously would require clunky equipment to track, now it all fits on your wrist or in your phone.
The impact of this is significant. Fitbit devices (and other similar ‘wearables’) save time, money and effort – making it easier than ever before for people to track things that affect their health, allowing them to make more informed decisions. Individuals are armed with information: they can get early indications something might be wrong and they can take information to healthcare practitioners if necessary. Habits are demystified, trackable, enabling you to do more about them.
Possibly the most exciting application for 3D printing might be in the field of prosthetics. Engineers and physicians are now able to create prosthetics which are now fully customised to the individual meaning they’re lighter, more comfortable and have more movement.
Using a 3D modelling program and computer-aided design (CAD) the prosthetic can be built virtually, before being 3D printed printer where it is built layer by layer until the finished product is ready to use.
Before 3D printing producing prosthetics was expensive, complicated and time-consuming. 3D printers can ensure that a prosthetic limb is ready within a day rather than the weeks, or sometimes even months, that it took before. They also come at a fraction of the cost of other prosthetics, costing just few hundred pounds or dollars compared to thousands. They can be modified to suit individual requirements and can be redesigned and reprinted time and time again for younger patients who are still growing.
3D printing is also opening up who can produce prosthetics – a group of volunteers, known as e-NABLE, recently created 3D printed prosthetic hand which cost just $50. The group are now looking to develop open-source design files for printing, making it even easier for people to create prosthetics in their own homes.
Livi is a medication appliance which dispenses medication to patients in their own homes.
It uses a cloud-based application which allows scheduling and monitoring of medication. The device remembers the user’s medication history and adherence data which can then be shared with physicians and carers.
Here’s how it works. You enter your medication order into the app through a phone or the internet. Once the order is received you pour the contents of your pill bottle into the dispenser – Livi’s container adapts to fit the size and shape of the pill. The clever device can then dispense your medication according to your dosage. It can dispense a 90-day supply of medication of up to 15 different pills and supplements and it even prompts you when and how to take their medication and will text or email if you miss a dose.
Cloud-based tech like Livi liberates people from the difficult and time-consuming process of managing medication. Theoretically it’s less fallible than humans too, ensuring accurate and timely doses of medication. But it also raises plenty of questions: could it be tampered with? Who is responsible when something goes wrong? What about older people who might need medication help the most, but understand technology the least?
In this post we share some exciting news: 5 universities from the United States are going to be offering courses on FutureLearn.
We’re happy to announce that we’ve got not one, not two, not three, not four, but five US universities joining FutureLearn!
American University, Colorado State University, Penn State University, Purdue University and UVA Darden School of Business are all going to be running courses throughout 2017.
They’re joining a growing set of partners from all over the world working with FutureLearn (we now offer course from organisations in 6 different continents!) to help learners develop their skills for the workplace.
As Simon Nelson, our CEO put it: “We work with around a quarter of the top universities in the world and are honoured to be welcoming such a stellar group of US universities to join the FutureLearn partnership. It is also incredibly exciting to be tackling the key challenge being faced across the US and the rest of the world – upskilling the workforce; something we will achieve not only with our university partners but also through partnerships with other major US National organisations, who are focused on enhancing skills in key professions.”
Two of our new US universities already have courses ready to join:
Keep an eye out for the others in the near future!
Codecademy’s very own Nick Duckwiler (left) and Ryan Tuck from Warby Parker (right) in our office. (📷: Mitch Boyer)
Last month, Codecademy and Warby Parker came together to work on a special Learn SQL from Scratch Capstone Project. It was during this time when I met Ryan Tuck, a Data Engineer at Warby, who played a major part in this partnership. So when he decided to drop by our office for the final QA round, I had to break out my notebook and ask some questions. Enjoy.
Hey Ryan, let’s start off with a question I’ve had for a while — what is a Data Engineer? (Is it similar to a Data Analyst or a Software Engineer?)
At Warby Parker, data engineers are responsible for creating and maintaining the plumbing required to support the data and reporting needs of the business. We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.
What languages/frameworks do you use at Warby?
On data engineering, we use Python as our general purpose programming language, as do most of the other teams in our Technology department. When it comes to databases, we use PostgreSQL for the majority of our SQL needs, and are beginning to use Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery for some of our larger datasets. We use Looker as our exclusive business intelligence entry point to all of this data.
What are some of the projects you worked on?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of of smart people in every department at our company to help them solve their varied data needs, from reconciling financial data with the Accounting team to automating and modeling standardized performance metrics for our team of over 200 customer experience advisors.
As part of a team of five supporting the data needs of a rapidly growing company, I’ve tried where possible to focus on helping our analysts solve their own problems. This includes helping people learn Python and commit to our codebase, guiding the creation of data models in SQL, and encouraging people to submit pull requests to add features in Looker, our BI tool.
Seeing dozens of otherwise “non-technical” colleagues opening up PRs on a daily basis, and consequently being part of the democratization of tech that we value at Warby Parker, is probably the most rewarding “project” I’ve been a part of.
One project finished recently during our first annual “Hackweek” is called Pipes, which allows anyone at the company to easily move large amounts of data from wherever to wherever (Looker, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc) on a regular cadence, or manually through a simple one-line chatbot interface. The adoption has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking to grow this sort of tooling out even more.
“We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.”
What got you into the data field?
I’ve always been drawn to analytical fields like math, and became pretty proficient in Excel during some internships in college. Once I had learned to program and learned more about data science and its applications in artificial intelligence, I knew that anything I could do to immerse myself in the world of data would be a step in the right direction.
Three and a half years ago, I landed a job as a junior software engineer at Warby Parker not fully knowing what I was in for, but am so glad I got the opportunity to help build tools to support an interesting and ever-changing data-driven culture here.
Where did you learn SQL and Python?
I had a background in C++, and was exposed to Python through an Intro to Data Science course. When Warby Parker hired me onto the Data team in 2015, I had never written a SQL query in my life, but picked it up quickly and within a few months started up internal SQL training classes, which I still teach on a monthly basis.
What does your tattoo say?
The ultimate cheatsheet.
This is Bayes’ Theorem, which is an equation that describes how to update probabilities given new evidence. Two summers ago I worked on building a tool to help predict weekly fantasy football performance. Some colleagues suggested a Bayesian approach would be appropriate, since there aren’t really enough data points in an NFL season to be able to use statistical approaches that require larger datasets, and I’d want to regularly update my predictions after each player’s latest performance.
I did a deep dive into understanding the (simple) math underlying Bayes’ Theorem and came out of that experience with a whole new worldview, understanding my entire knowledge of the world as a big and intricate probabilistic model that I was continuously updating with every experience I ever have. It was pretty transformative, and I figured that was worth a tattoo.
What is a concept in SQL/Python that’s essential to your work?
Donald Knuth said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve generally found this to be true, and try to live by it in my work. For example, I’ll generally prefer to keep a data model simple by rebuilding it for all time on a daily basis using a single SQL query instead of making a more complicated model that requires iteratively adding to a table, keeping track of state, updated timestamps, when something last ran, etc.
A wise man once said, “Duplicating data makes things go fast,” but databases are already impressively fast to begin with, without implementing anything to improve performance. Ultimately, I almost always approach a problem thinking about optimizing for my time over machine time, for readability over performance, and for introducing as little cognitive overhead as is required by the problem at hand. Only once performance issues or readability issues present themselves will some code be worth a rewrite.
Last question! Since you wrote Warby Parker’s internal SQL training courses, I know there gotta be some inner Curriculum Developer in you. Can you teach a SQL concept in 2 minutes?
Sure! Have you ever written a query that yields some result set and you think, “I’d love to query the stuff I just produced like it was a table?” Enter the WITH clause.
Suppose I have a mega query that gives the transaction summaries:
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
Using WITH, I can create a temporary table within my query that I can SELECT from and treat it just like a regular old table.
I will put everything from the previous query in a parentheses and use WITH to give it the name transaction_summaries.
Then I’ll apply the date and customer filtering down below for a more readable query, to separate out all the JOIN logic from the actual WHERE filters that I want to apply on that data.
with transaction_summaries as (
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
)
select
*
from
transaction_summaries
where
first_name = 'beyonce'
and
transaction_date > '2018–01–01'
order by
total_cost desc
limit
5
If you’re familiar with subqueries, this does a similar thing but makes the SQL far more readable, even if your query isn’t quite as performant as it would have been. This is essentially an implementation of the mantra “Don’t Repeat Yourself” that’s common in the world of programming.
Incredible. And love the SQL styling! 😍
Huge shout out to Ryan and the whole Warby Parker team for making this partnership happen. Special hat tips for behind-the-scenes support from:
A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer (via Life of Luba)
With Airbnb came a revolution of sorts in the world of vacation travel and culture. We sat down with Luba Yudasina, a YouTuber, an opera singer, and a Software Engineer on the Airbnb’s Homes Platform team, to discuss software engineering and her programming journey—from Codecademy to Airbnb!
Hey Luba, let’s start with the basics! What does a Software Engineer on the Platform team do at Airbnb?
Homes Platform’s mission is to create the building blocks to power all Homes categories. Any project undertaken by our team should be reusable and extensible in some way. This means that as a backend engineer, I have a lot of opportunities to work on impactful technical projects that create systems and services to support Homes, as well as collaborate across teams to come up with the best architectural decisions and designs.
Recently, our team wrote a blog post on classifying Room Types into categories using Machine Learning and computer vision. The room-type classification problem largely resembles the ImageNet classification problem, except our team’s model outcomes are customized room-types.
After a few experiments with various models, the team chose ResNet50 due to its good balance between model performance and computation time. To make it compatible with our use case, we added two extra fully connected layers and a Softmax activation in the end.
Let’s rewind a little bit. Coming from a chemical engineering background in college, how did you make the switch into programming?
I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada—a university with the biggest co-op program in the world. Co-op means that to obtain a bachelor’s degree you must complete a certain number of internships. If you are in Engineering at Waterloo, you must complete 5 internships to graduate.
In my first and second years, I interned at chemical engineering companies and afterwards I couldn’t see myself working in the field full-time. That’s why I’m particularly grateful that I studied at Waterloo: if not for co-op, I probably would not have realized I didn’t want to work in chemical engineering until getting a full-time job after graduation.
I happened to have a lot of friends in Computer Science and Software Engineering right when I realized Chem Eng wasn’t for me. They really encouraged me to try coding, and when I decided to follow their lead I never looked back! My first online programming course was Web Development on Codecademy 🙂
“It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being ‘one of the dudes.'” -Luba Yudasina
When I decided I wanted to learn computer science on my own, my goal was to get an internship in the field because working as a software engineer at a tech company would be the best test to really know if it was for me.
I happened to be in Munich, Germany on academic exchange for a whole year when I was learning how to code, so I hustled as much as I could while being there to get experience to learn quicker and have something to put down on my tech resume.
Almost immediately after arriving in Germany, I got a part time job as a developer at a game publishing company. I had a good friend in Computer Science at my German university: her and I ended up working on an Android app as a side project, etc. When I was ready, I started preparing for technical interviews. I then leveraged my network to refer me to companies and do mock technical interviews with me.
Yelp was really random though—a Yelp recruiter looked at my LinkedIn profile and didn’t even message me, but I messaged them anyway asking about internship opportunities, and that’s how I got my interview there!
Airbnb HQ in San Franciso
What is an essential app/item in your day-to-day?
Code searching! A lot of software engineering is problem solving and a lot of it is understanding other people’s code and the reasoning behind writing it a certain way. Searching through the codebases is almost essential to my day to day. Whenever I build something new or build on top of already existing tech, I need to understand how it works and is written, and code search is vital to this.
At Airbnb we use Google’s Codesearch for these purposes, but developers (myself included) also frequently use their IDEs to search for relevant code. I mostly use RubyMine or IntelliJ (depending on the codebase I’m working with).
In your videos, you’ve mentioned the intersection of gender and technology. Can you speak a bit more about that?
It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being “one of the dudes.”
I think it’s particularly important to redefine the stereotypes, and I hope that with my own example I can show young girls and women interested in the field that you don’t have to give up your feminine side to be a software engineer and still be into fashion, or makeup, or art (I personally sing opera) and have other interests outside of coding and be successful in the field.
Before we wrap up, do you have anything else you would like to say to our learners?
Don’t be discouraged, learn and absorb as much as you can! If you don’t understand a concept or can’t build a project right away, know that with practice, perseverance and concentration you will get there!
Take advantage of such amazing tools as Codecademy that are there for you to take and learn. Learning anything new can be frustrating, but knowing that you can do it, staying curious, asking questions and not losing your motivation is the key to success.
Huge shoutout to Luba for this insightful interview. It’s always incredibly moving to see a Codecademy learner go on to do bigger things. Go subscribe to her YouTube channel, Life of Luba.
And thank you to the whole Homes Platform/Engineering team at Airbnb for the support. Check out their wonderful open source projects on airbnb.io.
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Last fall, Tom Scocca, editor of the essential blog Hmm Daily, wrote a tiny, searing post that has been rattling around my head ever since.
“Some ideas about how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests,” he began. “Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.”
Mr. Scocca — a longtime writer at Gawker until that site was muffled by a billionaire — offered a straightforward argument for kneecapping the wealthiest among us. A billion dollars is wildly more than anyone needs, even accounting for life’s most excessive lavishes. It’s far more than anyone might reasonably claim to deserve, however much he believes he has contributed to society.
At some level of extreme wealth, money inevitably corrupts. On the left and the right, it buys political power, it silences dissent, it serves primarily to perpetuate ever-greater wealth, often unrelated to any reciprocal social good. For Mr. Scocca, that level is self-evidently somewhere around one billion dollars; beyond that, you’re irredeemable.
He continues by discussing the idea of abolishing billionaires:
But it is an illustration of the political precariousness of billionaires that the idea has since become something like mainline thought on the progressive left. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are floating new taxes aimed at the superrich, including special rates for billionaires. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also favors higher taxes on the wealthy, has been making a moral case against the existence of billionaires. Dan Riffle, her policy adviser, recently changed his Twitter name to “Every Billionaire Is a Policy Failure.” Last week, HuffPost asked, “Should Billionaires Even Exist?”
I suspect the question is getting so much attention because the answer is obvious: Nope. Billionaires should not exist — at least not in their present numbers, with their current globe-swallowing power, garnering this level of adulation, while the rest of the economy scrapes by.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
— Should anyone have a billion dollars? Is there a limit to how much money a person should have? Are billionaires a sign of a country’s health or weakness? Are billionaires helping or hurting society?
— How convincing is Mr. Manjoo’s case against billionaires? Where is his argument most effective? Where is he least persuasive?
— How concerned are you about income inequality and the concentration of wealth in this country? What do you think should be done to address or remedy these issues?
— In Reason Magazine, Nick Gillespie, a libertarian, responds to Mr. Manjoo’s Opinion column. He asks if the world would be better off if former Beatles musican Paul McCartney didn’t have a net worth of $1.2 billion:
Would there be less suffering in the world if his money is expropriated and transferred to the wretched of the earth via higher taxes rather than through his own charitable donations and investments? Probably not, especially when you think about how much suffering, especially in the developing world, is the direct result of government action.
He continues:
“Abolish Billionaires” is a smart slogan, but that’s all it is. Figuratively lopping the heads off of the richest of the rich will not make life easier for the poor and dispossessed, and it won’t increase economic growth and living standards. It might sate the bloodlust of left-wing populists for a while, but certainly that outcome can be purchased for lower cost.
Do you agree with Mr. Gillespie’s argument? Should we blame billionaires for their own good fortune, hard work or talent? Will abolishing billionaires hurt economic growth and living standards and end up harming those less fortunate?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
1. Some of the most popular role-playing games involve witches, monsters and dangerous robots. Why do Carolyn Zhang and Raymond Zhong, the authors, describe playing the roles of mom and dad as “the most fearsome of characters”?
2. The authors write that the video game Chinese Parents is a hit, even though there are no official numbers on its sales. What evidence do they provide to support their claim?
3. What have players learned about their parents, and parenting in general, by playing the game?
4. What are some of the joys and trials of raising children included in the game? Which were most interesting, true to life or surprising to you?
5. What are some of the defining characteristics of parent-children relationships in China, according to the article? What is a Tiger Mom?
6. How does the game reflect or reinforce gender roles? Give one example from the article to support your answer.
7. Kong Qingxun describes the experience of playing Chinese Parents:
“At the beginning, you think it’s just a 100-meter run,” he said, referring to life. “Then you realize it’s a marathon. And finally you understand it’s a relay race that never ends.”
How does the game end or, more precisely, not end? How does that explain Mr. Kong’s statement?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
— Would you want to play Chinese Parents? Why or why not? Which aspects of gameplay are most interesting or intriguing to you?
— Do you engage in role-playing video games? If yes, which is your favorite and why? What life lessons, if any, have your learned from playing it?
— Do you think Chinese Parents would be successful with American consumers? What aspects of the game do you think American audiences would relate to? Imagine you are hired by Moyuwan Games, the independent studio that developed Chinese Parents, to redesign it for an American audience. What changes might you make?
— Chinese Parents reflects many of the unique attitudes, beliefs and recent history of China. Select a role-playing or other video game and explain how it reflects the culture of its origin.
GANGNEUNG, South Korea — It may not have been the most obvious choice for Yura Min and Alexander Gamelin, the American-born ice dancing pair representing South Korea at the Olympics, to skate on Tuesday to “Arirang,” a Korean folk song whose roots go back hundreds of years.
…. The name Arirang actually refers to a category of folk songs. There are countless regional variations, with dozens of known melodies and thousands of known lyrics. The common thread among them is the use of the word “Arirang,” or other words that sound similar. Complicating matters some is the fact that those words do not have a universally accepted meaning. Some historians believe them to be simply euphonious syllables, a Korean fa-la-la.
