Hipster Hackers Aims to Teach Beginners to Code

A new #VegasTech meetup called Hipster Hackers will hold their first “Web Basics” session on Monday, January 12, 2015 from 6:30-8:00pm at Work in Progress.
The goal of the meetup is to teach community members to become developers by attending focused classes intended to teach from the ground up.
“We started the meetup because we noticed with the Las Vegas Ruby Users Group, it was always hard to cater to the different levels of developers that would come in,” said co-organizer Jeremy Woertink. “Plus, the community didn’t realize that the Ruby group would cover topics outside of Ruby. The current VegasTech scene has lots of great groups out there, but none that really focus on teaching and especially teaching beginners. All these other groups we have are generally presentations, and keynote style meetups or hands on with high level code.”
Jeremy Woertink and co-organizer Russ Smith want to help community members who don’t know where to start with programming.
“The people that want to learn, but are too afraid to speak up at the other groups for fear of the “noob” feeling,” he explained. “Think of a gym where people are afraid to workout because of all the grunting meat heads, and expensive trainers. Well, we want to be the opposite of that.”
The first meetup will be a “Welcome to the Web” class. Starting out with how websites work, the session will move to the technologies used to run a website — all from a high-level overview.
“This group is geared specifically towards beginners only. We don’t want to shun people that do have experience, but this group will be run like a classroom and focused on super basics,” Jeremy Woertink said. “We do already have a few people that have volunteered to be co-instructors and TAs for the class. If anyone would like to volunteer for one of these positions, or to even teach a class, they can just get in tough with the organizers.”
Before the “Web Basics” meetup takes place on January 12, 2014, the organizers say the next 6 months will be planned out, so that each meetup focuses on a step-by-step process to learning the basics of programming and web development.
“The meetup will work almost like an after-hours course,” Jeremy Woertink explained. “Some meetups may have “homework” assignments for people to work on between classes. We will start out easy for now and probably just do every other week. If we get a large enough request for more classes, we may consider moving to every week.”
Jeremy Woertink said the #VegasTech community can help this meetup in it’s early stages by being supportive and helping spreading the word.
“The goal of this group is going to be radically different from ones the community has had in the past. It’s a tough job, but any developers that would like to be a substitute teacher for a class, or would like to be a tutor/TA/tech support, just talk with us,” he said.