I am going to organize a coaching course to learn Javascript + Node.js.

My particular technology of choice is node.js because:

• If starting from scratch, having to learn just one language for both frontend and backend makes sense. Javascript is the only language you can use in a browser and you will have to learn it anyway. They say it's kind of Lisp or Scheme in disguise and a pretty cool language by itself.
• Node.js is a modern asynchronous web framework, made by running Javascript code server-side on Google's open-source V8 JavaScript Engine It seems to be well suited for building highly-loaded backend servers, and works for regular websites, too.
• Hack Reactor teaches it to make 98% of graduates earn $110k/year, on average, after 3 months of study. But their tuition is $17,780. We will do much cheaper.

I wanted to learn modern web technologies for a while, but haven't gotten myself to actually do it. When I tried to start learning, I was overwhelmed by the number of things I still have to learn to get anything done. Here's the bare minimum:

• html
• css
• javascript
• node.js
• git

I believe the optimum course of action is to hire a guru to do coaching for me and several other students and split the cost. The benefits compared to learning by yourself are:

• personal communication (via Skype or similar) and doing tasks along with the others provides an additional drive to complete your studies
• guru can choose an optimum path for me to reach the desired capabilities in shortest time.

The capabilities that I want to achieve are:

i. To be able to add functionality to my Tumblr blog (where I run a writing prompt) by either using custom theme + Tumblr API or extracting posts via API and using them to render my blog on a separate website. node.js is definitely not needed here, rather than this is the simplest case of doing something useful that I need to with web technologies and node.js is my web technology of choice.

ii. To hack on Undum, a client-side hypertext interactive fiction framework. My thoughts on why I think Undum and IF are cool are here.

• To port features from one version of Undum to another and create a version of Undum that is able to run all existing games (about 5 of them)
• To abstract away Undum's internal game representation and state so that they can be loaded and saved externally, over a network
• To create a server part for Undum that controls the version of the book you're allowed to read (allows to read one new chapter a day, remembers the branch you're reading, up to the end, if you've read to the end, etc.)
• To create a website that works as a YouTube and an editor for Undum games

iii. To create new experiments that utilize modern web technologies to interesting and novel effect. I know that this sounds really vague, but the point is that sometimes you never know what can be done until you learn the relevant skills. One example of the kind of thing that I think about is what this paper is talking about:

Lee et al. - Real-Time Disease Surveillance Using Twitter Data, Demonstration on Flu and Cancer

Friend's advice: Skype Premium + Dropbox + Piratepad + Slideshare + Doodle should be enough. What do you think?

Want to join? Questions? Suggestions for better videoconferencing software than Skype?