Ask HN: Where can I find a tutor for web development?

3 points by mvleming ↗ HN
I'm looking for a tutor to learn web development from. I'm having some frustration right now going from I don't know what I don't know to I know what I don't know, and I want to have a relationship with a person who can help me through this process.

Does HN have any suggestions where I can find someone? Any would be appreciated. :)

11 comments

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this is a good place to find help / mentorship: https://clarity.fm there are some people there that are willing to help for free (me included) and some for a fee

besides that, have you looked at sites like stackoverflow? did the tutorials at codecademy? udemy? udacity (it has a web deb class by the creator of reddit)

I use Stackoverflow very often. I've done tutorials at Codeacademy, Udacity, as well as others (Club Treehouse comes to mind). I'm not a beginner with web development anymore; I'm looking to go the next level.

I will look into clarity.fm, thank you.

I just looked in clarity.fm. It doesn't look to me the mentors in Technical Advice are programmers but center more around business. Is this true? I'm looking for an 'engineer' not a 'salesguy'.
Try your local programming meetups. If there aren't any, then start one.

You also might start a "Code Until Dawn" or "Local Hackers" group, for coders to get together and hang out.

Last but not least, teamtreehouse.com and codecademy.com

I used teamtreehouse.com and codeacademy.com. I was saying in another comment I'm not a beginner anymore.

But I will look to meetups, I don't know why I hadn't thought of this.

Check out http://bloc.io! They provide one on one mentoring sessions throughout their 12 week online web development course.
I'm looking to have a lot of flexibility. I'm not interested in following a curriculum. I want to learn specific areas in web development (server-side programming, webcam chatting are two).
What sort of thing are you looking for? What aspects of web development interest you, how much help do you want? Do you just want someone who can review your code and answer questions, or do you want someone who will give you directed tasks? What do you think the arrangement would look like? Also, roughly where (country/state/time zone) are you based?
I'm looking for a tutor not to develop my skills just for the sake of it, but to develop my skills in certain areas of web development so I can build this website I want to build. So not so much as reviewing code or giving directed tasks but guiding me and giving me resources I can use to learn from. The arrangement would be over Skype, maybe once or twice a week for an hour. My timing is flexible.

I have quite a bit of experience with HTML, CSS, and a little of javascript. I've been exposed to Ruby on Rails. I want to learn server-side programming, how to add webcam chatting, for two.

I've got a lot of experience doing web development, but it's mainly concentrated in one particular area - javascript apps that run on a single page and use a streaming connection to get all their data. I've been doing this kind of thing on and off for 10 years now, and the ecosystem has changed massively in the last 2 years, so a lot of problems I'm used to solving by myself (e.g. MVC, unit testing) are now more sensibly solved by some of the newer libraries.

While I have to be competent in server side programming, I find it a bit of a chore, and believe that increasingly for hobbyist work, using other peoples more general servers is the way forward - e.g. I recently wrote a program that can run from a basic http server and uses google doc spreadsheets for all its back end storage and OAuth2 for all the user authentication.

You didn't mention if there's a server side technology you're particularly interested in, since obviously there's a lot of choice in that area.

Anyway, given all that, I think I'm probably the wrong guy for you, but if you don't get any better offers within a week or so, contact me on kybernetikos@gmail.com.

Hey there! I wouldn't mind helping out ;). Been doin' various kinds of front and backend web development for startups for about two years now.

My Skype handle is saiko-chriskun if you're still lookin'.