The time has come. I’m doing a live group course.
TL;DR:
From any skill level to Coda Superpowers
Content: everything from the Coda Fundamentals curriculum + extras and a personal touch
Twice a week for 2 months: Tuesdays and Fridays
Oct 4 — Nov 29
1PM–3PM ET / 10AM–12PM PT
That’s 17 sessions in total, or 34 hours of our quality time.
~15 people in a group
Recordings available
US $799 for the Q4’22 inaugural group. Next cohorts will be $1299
The final Fundamentals course (concise on-demand videos) at no extra cost when it’s out
Now, the details
Who is this for?
The course is meant for anyone who wants to get fluent with Coda. It’s for people who don’t just want to learn how to reproduce guidebook stuff, but how to actually solve for their own bespoke needs:
- Small business owners looking to automate their ops with Coda
- Employees responsible for building Coda docs at their company
- Mid- and large-business owners evaluating Coda for their internal use and willing to see all its capabilities for themselves
- Anyone else looking to become a Coda expert and earn by building docs
What do you get?
- A super packed course that’s the only thing you’ll need to get fluent with Coda.
- Seventeen 2-hour-long sessions with yours truly: half lecture, half discussion time.
- A private chat with the group and myself for discussion beyond class time.
- Access to the Coda Fundamentals video course once it’s out.
- The reputation of a person who got Paul’s seal of approval
The curriculum?
- Intro & demo of what Coda is capable of
- Coda vs the Sheets approach and how to switch
- Everything data models
- Everything Coda tables
- How to write formulas — not the list to memorize but the principles to use
- Actions and how to make advanced workflows with them
- Presentation capabilities
- Collaboration and safety
- Connecting docs together and to the outer world
- A gentle intro to making custom Packs
- A block on performance
- Some cool UI tricks
- and whatever else we get to fit into those 17 sessions — now that’ll depend on how good of a student each one of you will be
— so, basically, everything in this old plan from February, and some extras, too.
This is a test run, so the curriculum is very tentative. You as the inaugural group will help me shape this course into something I can then teach recurrently. Yes, this isn’t going to be a one-off thing anymore — I’ll make both the video courses but also keep teaching these live groups time to time.
It’s actually the best part of being an inaugural group — we all don’t know how it will go: how fast we’ll move as a group and how well the lessons stick. What I guarantee from my side is that:
- I’ll teach you all I want to teach even if it takes more classes to do that, and—
- If we finish it faster than in 17 sessions, I’ll find more stuff to fill out the remaining ones
There may or may not be the final project — we’ll decide on that together.
I plan on giving you some homework though!
This vs the coda.io/learn
The Learn doc is a good kickstart walkthrough of Coda with bite-sized videos and interactive samples. It gives some sense about what building blocks are there in Coda but no fundamental understanding of how to combine those together to build complete solutions.
My course is aimed foremostly at filling those understanding gaps and helping you see the system through my eyes.
This vs the Doctorate
The Doctorate is a free certification program by Coda, also conducted in cohorts. It’s a 5-week group classes program with a final project, and if you’re a complete beginner you can take the extra 2 weeks of the Bootcamp to level out with the rest. I took it and while the content there was more advanced and the final project rush was fun, IMO it still didn’t focus on the fundamental understanding. I took the first ever group over a year ago though — @maria and @Rocky_Moon sure have improved it since then.
That said, it’s a free program and you get a Community badge, and the Capstone Project is fun, so I still recommend taking it as an extra.
This vs other courses
I only know of one commercial course in the works so far. From the announcements it sounds like that course will be focused on listing and documenting “every single formula.”
I’m yet to see what it actually becomes but frankly I’m a big opposer of such approach. Memorizing every formula and its parameters has about the same value as memorizing a dictionary. Of course knowing the most eloquent and lapidary words for the case is cool. But the vocabulary alone won’t help you speak the language if you lack the feeling of some fundamental grammar.
I’m not giving you the dictionary. I’m teaching the grammar and the feeling of the language first.
Enrollment and payment
The registration form is open till Sep 27. Then I’ll pick about ~15 people for the cohort and contact you about payment. I’ll ask you to pay before the course starts. I hope this doesn’t happen but in case you’re unhappy with how it goes I’ll make a refund.
There’s one free spot that you can win. Simply follow me on Twitter and retweet my announcement, and I’ll pick one person randomly:
If you only want the free spot but won’t enroll the course otherwise, don’t fill out the form. Do it only if you’d take the course anyway.
