Disqus - Latest Comments for michaelmcgee

Re: SXSW PanelPicker®

Mike McGee — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 12:08:23 -0000

Yes yes yes let’s make this panel happen!

Re: SXSW PanelPicker®

Mike McGee — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 10:17:14 -0000

This is too important not to discuss! Coral reefs are beautiful and even more critical to Earth's ecosystem. We need to do something before we are completely screwed! There's still time!

Re: College Football Rankings: Predicting AP Top 25 for Week 6

Mike McGee — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 03:36:06 -0000

Solid effort! As a Northwestern fan, I'd love to see them at #13 instead of #14, but that Florida win will vault them up the polls and deservedly so. Hopefully Ole Miss falls out of the Top 15!

Re: SEA-GB Grades: Steady Rodgers, defense stifle Seahawks

Mike McGee — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 14:07:20 -0000

Agreed. When Mike Neal FINALLY stayed at home and tackled Wilson on the last designed run I literally jumped and applauded. Do your job and let your teammates chase Marshawn Lynch.

Re: SXSW PanelPicker

Mike McGee — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 19:10:30 -0000

These are great points! One of the benefits of having incubators in higher education is that it gives students the opportunity a safer environment to take risks. However, as a college student, you have other academic priorities which can be hard to manage while trying to build a product or startup.

Universities have made progress in this area over the past 3-5 years, but still has a long way to go to provide an optimal environment for budding entrepreneurs.

Re: The Good Patrons of 750 Words

Mike McGee — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 13:45:12 -0000

Congratulations!

Re: A look back at 1 Million Cups Fargo 2014

Mike McGee — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:14:10 -0000

What an AWESOME year for 1MC Fargo! So honored to play a small role in such an awesome startup community event. Congratulations!

Re: Technology Shapes History — Here's What's Wrong About IHOP's "Dem Stacks Tho" Tweet

Mike McGee — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 12:05:58 -0000

As someone who's one of the biggest fans of "Dat [insert] tho" I would give IHOP more credit if they were truly "bout it bout it." Unfortunately with the "Errybody got time fo' dat" status I'm fairly certain they have no clue what they are doing lol.

Re: How To Find the Right Coding School

Mike McGee — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:10:36 -0000

Thanks for the love @Amrit Judge! We are excited to be a part of the alternative education movement!

Re: How To Find the Right Coding School

Mike McGee — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 21:13:54 -0000

Back in 2011 we were the first ones to create a 3-month in-person program for beginners, and since then have been fortunate to help many women and others from diverse backgrounds learn how to become developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. We have just launched a new program called Starter School (http://starterschool.com), and we are definitely looking to get more women into our program starting this September. You can learn about Erinn Barr, one of our awesome inaugural students here - http://www.starterschool.co...

Re: Replace Checks With The Updated Dwolla MassPay

Mike McGee — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 11:57:30 -0000

Thanks Caity! It looks like the Guest Checkout limit is $1,000, which is lower than what we need for our programs, but I'll definitely turn to MassRequest when that scenario is presented.

Re: Replace Checks With The Updated Dwolla MassPay

Mike McGee — Tue, 27 May 2014 12:13:21 -0000

We have a slightly different situation than the one presented in this post. We receive a lot of tuition checks from our students but the process is very inefficient. Would MassPay work for us and how easy is it for people who are not Dwolla users to get setup to use MassPay?

Re: Our New Workspace | Starter League

Mike McGee — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 20:52:25 -0000

Thanks Mike! You are definitely welcome for a tour!

Re: Controller Tests: Confidence without fragile views

Mike McGee — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 13:37:34 -0000

Thanks for taking the time to write this up Daniel! Being on the design side this post is a little foreign to me, but great to see how much goes into every aspect of the development process.

Re: Hack

Mike McGee — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 17:12:57 -0000

The problem with some of the schools in our space is not setting the right expectations. And while we haven't been perfect at The Starter League in that regard, we do consistently communicate that our programs are just the start of your education. The students that have bought into that message are now starting companies, landing jobs, and building products 3-12 months after finishing at our school. 25% even come back and take more classes!

Steve Huffman is correct in saying that these schools are not going to solve the talent crunch now or even in the next 1-2 years. But if these graduates continue learning (which all great professional developers and designers do now) then we are going to see some great problems being solved in the next decade.

Re: The Awesomeness of Battlestar Galactica

Mike McGee — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 11:16:07 -0000

This is the first thing I thought about and was going to post it... But I was too busy watching BSG.

Re: Why You Shouldn’t Learn To Code For Your Startup

Mike McGee — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 13:31:29 -0000

I agree that having a non-technical founder learn code will not automatically guarantee success, but just learning how to prototype websites and web apps can make creating (or running) a tech startup that much easier. From better communication with your developers and designers to more efficient process of getting ideas to production stage, having a tech foundation for your business is extremely helpful.

Re: Analyzing what’s really earning income, paying $36K for Startup School and more

Mike McGee — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 07:50:02 -0000

Appreciate you including Starter School in your roundup! I understand that $36K can seem like a lot, but when you put that against similar five-figure amounts to pay someone else to get your idea off the ground without success, or paying six figures to go to an MBA program, we believe Starter School is not only a cheaper option, but gives you an exponential amount of value in return. We have proven that we can help beginners learn how to code and design in 3 months, so we are excited about what we can do in 9 months to help people ship products to market.

Re: My Smart Phone Is No Longer Working For Me

Mike McGee — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 13:39:49 -0000

This idea of a "control center" is something I am very interested in. As a startup co-founder, one of my biggest issues is focusing on the right task or priority at the right time. Even if you have a targeted list of 3-5 things you want to get done, you're still in a constant battle with all the other tasks and follow-ups that you have procrastinated on in the past day, week, month, year, etc. And yes if you choose to not to do something it could mean that those things aren't important, but you still think about them or are reminded of them if you run into that person you were supposed to get back to.

What I would love is a system (or an app since that's the time we live in) to help us focus better on the things we want to get down in a given day. And this is just talking about our personal battle with getting things done, this doesn't even begin to address the issue of working together with other people on your team and respecting their priorities! When we communicate with each other (whether real-time or asynchronously) we don't truly understand what the person on the other end is working on or going through. My goal is to create something that helps my team get closer to that goal.

Re: Re:Inventing Email

Mike McGee — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:04:10 -0000

Should be "Re:inventing email" not "Re:inveting email"

Love the UI though.

Re: Going #Badgeless at SXSW

Mike McGee — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:18:52 -0000

Went badgeless last year and have a great time! We didn't even have a hotel!

Re: Don’t Start By Building a Startup

Mike McGee — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:57:28 -0000

Great post Colin! This is something that other entrepreneurs don't learn as fast as you did, even though I am sure that you probably would have wanted to get to this conclusion faster! Starting with a personal problem is one crucial stepping stone of building a successful product, web app, and/or company.

Excited to see what you do next!

Re: Ladies Learning Code: We Want to Remind Everyone That Code Doesn't Care What Gender You Are

Mike McGee — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:42:10 -0000

Great to see that the community is growing!!

Re: Learn to code in 8 weeks with Bloc, an online bootcamp for would-be developers

Mike McGee — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:24:28 -0000

You are right that they are not mutally exclusive entities. The point I was getting at is that it's a lot harder to get immersion by self-studying. You can go to Meetups, have skype sessions, pour through Stack Overflow, the list goes on and on, but it takes a lot of willpower to keep that going. Haha trust me, my co-founder and I did this for a year and learned a lot!

But, it kinda sucked haha. Which is why we thought to ourselves, "shouldn't there be a better way?"

In terms of the rocket scientist example, it was kinda lazy, but what I was getting is that I don't believe if you want to go to a physical place to learn something that can never be good in it. Tell that to our alums who are now working as entry-level software developers. No they are not amazing, they have just been coding for 6 months, but if they keep it up in a few years they will probably be really good!

Yes, we can all learn on our own, but we don't have to torture ourselves if it's not fun and working in the best way.

Re: Learn to code in 8 weeks with Bloc, an online bootcamp for would-be developers

Mike McGee — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:34:50 -0000

I strongly disagree with that statement. I feel you could say that about anything, why not learn rocket science by just reading a book!

I feel that the best way for beginners (like myself) to learn how to code is to do it in an immersive environment. That's what we have done with Code Academy here in Chicago. By September we will have taught over 250 people how to code their own web applications, and many of them have continued to build apps (even getting jobs and creating startups). Yes you can learn on your by using a book or online resource, but for beginners we feel it's more effective to have a more immersive environment.