Hello Beijing! <3 <3 <3 <3 ||Introduction||

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Hello Beijing Campers!

I guess we no longer need a VPN to idle on Facebook, eh? =D

My name is Shawn, I’m an American expat teaching English in China. I am a CompSci dropout, worked in IT a few years doing work with Exchange and Office 365 in Seattle before realizing that is NOT why I wanted to study computers and I didn’t really know how to get out. So I hit the big red button and started working with kids. Now that I am 28 years old and have been teaching a few years, I am hoping to tap back into those ideals. I don’t want to abandon my experiences as an educator completely because this really has been quite rewarding, I’d just like to work on my problem solving skills, challenge myself in different ways and hopefully find a career that takes me forward for the next several years. I know I can always come back to teaching.

When I was a kid, I was all about Freedom of Information and old school hacker ideals. Now that things have cooled a bit I have a great idea for an Open Source project that I would really like to work on that I believe can really change the ESL market and I think that is equally awesome =D

Information. Education. Freedom. That’s what it is all about, right? The only catch is I will be married soon to a nice girl who has stood by me and while we don’t plan on having children soon I need to think about her and if I am not teaching then I need to find another way to make money.

My goal is to go Full Stack. I learned HTML4 when I was a kid and alot of the ‘nit and grit’ of tweaking a site’s appearance bores me which is why I have elected to wait to finish my Tribute Page and Portfolio until I get farther ahead and can build something more awesome. I am learning primarily through FCC and Treehouse. I like the videos on Treehouse and have followed along through a couple of their practice projects. English coding books are difficult to find, even in Beijing but I find most of the time that when I am reaching for or searching for resources outside of these two I am simply allowing myself to get distracted. The Gitter community here is great as well as the Mozilla Developer Network and W3 Consortium. I am sure I will need more later on and have already been scoping out NodeSchool and other resources, but am relying on the community here to lead me in the right direction.

Wish me luck my sisters and brothers. I hope you all find what you are looking for!

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Hi Shawn, Nice to meet you here.

I’m a learner in FCC and startup evangelist in Beijing. Welcome to join our Facebook and Beijing Wechat group by add my wechat account: +86-18611023418 by FCC as a code. Thanks,

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You already added me :slight_smile: Thanks alot!

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Hello Shawn !

I am studying programming in France in a school called Epitech. and I just got accepted into the Tsingua University in Beijing I heard it’s a really great school, and that would be cool to meet a fellow camper there !

I have also been an exchange student in the US back in 2012 and I also do hope you are going to find whatever you are looking for ! :slight_smile:

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Hey guys,

I’m a medium-term Beijing foreign friend that’s iterated through a few careers over here. Now, tired of recent client communications work, I’m re-kindling my adolescent interest in coding and loving the objective, creative, problem-solving nature of it. I’ve worked out a part-time work situation while I’ve been using some online sources to study. I eventually want to work professionally as a developer, and I’m aiming roughly at end of-year, start of next year, but we’ll see… Hoping to add Node and Rails and maybe some js frameworks like React to my arsenal by then.

I kicked things off with Treehouse, and really enjoyed their early front-end track courses (HTML, CSS, and JS), but got a bit exasperated with the advanced js courses. I found Code School’s Try jQuery course great, so now I’m working through some of its courses. All the while, I’ve used FCC as resource for putting my knowledge into practice, and am steadily making progress toward the end of the front-end cert. I’ll also say, if you can find pdf versions of coding books, it’s relatively inexpensive to take them to a big print shop to print out and make a book for you–university areas have a lot of these and other places as well.

Looking forward to joining some of the local events now.

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Please add me to your group, also a foreighner living in Beijing

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I’m down the road in Qinghuangdao.

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Have you tried Taobao?

Chinese? If so, after 5 years, of living in China and being married, you’ll be able to apply for a Chinese green card, which should lift restrictions imposed by a work permit.