Announcements

Coding for Beginners, taught by Dan Nguyen at General Assembly, Thursday, 3/24 8 pm

Update: It’s sold out and we are seeing huge demand for another class. So we are working on finding new time/space.

Hacks/Hackers is teaming up with tech space General Assembly to start offering courses in the digital journalism space! Our first offering is by Dan Nguyen (@dancow), a news application developer at Pro Publica (and photographer of many of our Hacks/Hackers events), who will be teaching “Coding for Beginners.”

Date & Time: Thursday, March 24, 8-9:30 p.m.

Place: General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th floor (b/tw 20th and 21st)

Cost: $30

Registration: http://codingforbeginners.eventbrite.com. Registration is DONE directly through Eventbrite. You will not be able to RSVP or pay via the Hacks/Hackers NYC Meetup page even though it’s listed there.

Course Description: For those wanting to understand and make use of the world’s information, there has never been a better time to learn how to program. Everything from government statistics to daily conversations are stored in publicly available, easy-to-process formats. And modern programming languages, such as Ruby, have made it significantly easier to just “get things done,” even as a beginner.

Students will learn the fundamentals of programming by creating simple yet powerful scripts to collect and organize the data found in Web services such as Twitter, Google Maps, and Foursquare. The class will walk through sample Ruby code to understand the basic theory of programming, including variables, methods, arrays and loops. At the end, students will be able to write a fully-functional custom script to access and scrape website data.

This class is intended for absolute newbies and those beginning to learn how to code. Laptops are optional. Code for the lesson will be provided so that students can follow along during class and after.

Prerequisites: None.

More offerings to come. If you have an idea for teaching a quality tech journalism course, contact us at nyc[at]hackshackers[dot]com

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