We are a startup called CodePath founded by Nathan Esquenazi and Tim Lee. We are a very small company with a vision of changing the way developers learn and play with new technologies and platforms.
As software engineers, we all have a strong need to keep up with the rapidly changing field of software development. Have you ever wanted to play with a new technology and wished that you had other engineers to learn and collaborate with, mentors to save you countless hours and guide your learning as well as high-quality curriculum and projects to make learning more efficient and fun?
Yeah, we did too. This is in large part why we founded CodePath. We are engineers and founders and we wanted a better way for engineers to learn exciting new languages and platforms. We learned mobile on our own (by ourselves) using books and blog posts and we want to take the time to make it easier for everyone else.
When we started learning Android and iOS, we were frustrated with the outdated, vague and inaccurate guides we saw littered around the internet. Why was open-source software changing the world but if I wanted to learn about how to use fragments for Android, finding up-to-date and practical documentation was like pulling teeth. Often only stack overflow and a random blog post would be available to help me learn. And often the posts had outdated or misleading information.
We think as open-source developers and as software engineers, we can do better. Why not have a crowdsourced Android (or any platform for that matter) documentation repository that any developer can edit? Why can't we work together to save others countless hours of pain and frustration resulting from old blog posts and outdated tutorials? Please help us get the word out to as many Android developers as possible!
In addition, as engineers we always wish we could meet other engineers to hack with, and maybe even mentors to learn the new technologies from. Imagine how many hundreds of hours you could save if you had an experienced engineer in the trenches guiding your learning and reviewing your code. Not to mention people to hack on cool projects with.
Still, we would want it all to be free and accessible to any serious engineers looking to learn new tech. Most engineers have full-time jobs. This is why we started the free "evening" bootcamps in San Francisco. Where we run engineers in cohorts through everything they need to know to do Android or iOS development. If you are in San Francisco and want to learn Android, be sure to check out our free meetup events as well! We want to help connect smart engineers together so they can build cool things.
Right now, we are building curriculum, creating in-person and online bootcamps and running meetup events to change the way people learn Android (and hack with other engineers).
At the moment, the best way to help is to contribute to our guides or tell as many developers about them as possible. If you see a missing topic, please raise an issue or add the wiki page yourself. A list of missing cliffnotes might be a good place to start. If you see inaccurate information, let us know or fix it directly!
A great way to learn and contribute is to annotate Android lecture videos using Notate. You can summarize various parts of the video, or add bookmarks about where certain topics get discussed.
Another way to help out is to answer questions on our Google Group where new users can ask questions and people can discuss topics related to Android and these guides.
If you want to learn Android, join our free bootcamps. If you already know Android and like what we are doing, please email us at help (at) codepath.com and we'd love to talk with you!
Also, if you have any feedback or just want to chat with us, please reach out to contact (at) codepath (dot) com. In addition, we are a fledgling bootstrapped startup so if you like this guide and what we are trying to do, please consider donating to the cause!
