Udacity sponsors a three month first round “Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship”.

When I applied to the Mobile Web Specialist track I was not sure what I would get out of Udacity. I considered myself a middling self-taught web programmer. (Here’s a blog that documents my learning journey and here’s the links (1 and 2) for my most popular app with over half million users). If I could learn anything I wanted to on my own, what would be Udacity’s value proposition for me ? So my expectations were fairly low even when I heard I got the scholarship. Fast forward three months.

I am blown away by the experience.

Why ? Two words — community and open source.

I quickly became part of a rich evolving learning community.

Four specific experiences were invaluable:

• For the first time in my life I worked on not just one but two open source projects, one of which I initiated both built around maps. One was the Navi project with a very large team and a great lead Bryan who was very helpful. Another one was Mappa an all women project, one that I initiated just with Khusbu but quickly grew to include some very talented and hardworking women. Mappa started off with some of the code I used for a Udacity course using knockout js. Halfway through the project we switched to React, another interesting experience of changing track midway and managing the implications on the project timeline. On Navi, I focused on making documentation easy to read and understand. In the process I became familiar with git, github, learned to read other people’s code, realized the importance of documentation and much more.

• Working with students from different programming backgrounds taught me a lot. There were absolute beginners, those with some experience, and others that with significant experience in open source and programming. With such a diversity of experience, collaboration is the only way the community moves together as a whole. The more experienced ones helped the less experienced ones, and the less experienced ones helped the more experienced by asking questions that need to be answered.

• A community needs tools to grow and to communicate. Udacity chose Slack and Forums. What even Udacity could not predict was how the tools would be used. The organic growth and innovative use of the tools provided (Slack channel, forums) and tools not provided (Google Hangouts, opened issues on Github) was fascinating and could probably be a PhD in itself. Some folks started a list of useful resources, I wrote a tool to capture video captions from Udacity lessons and many others organized meetups and study sessions.

• I was exposed to the advantages and disadvantages of the democratic experience where coders of different ability often have the same voice, and work together in a transparent atmosphere. You can join any channel you want, most ask for help when they need it without shame, and people are empowered to work on projects even if they don’t have much experience.

This led me to immediately contrast this way of working to the typical workplace that I am so used to — hierarchical, top down management structure, and with many black boxes.

Working on open source made me think about and reaffirm the importance of transparency, collaboration, balancing top-down design with bottom-up innovations in code and in life

Given the diversity of programming backgrounds, and seeing the difficulty in communication between those who knew a lot and those that were beginners, I have been inspired to tackle the gap: to really understand a topic in depth and create accessible materials that explain the topic to beginners or those with relatively less experience. This was the single biggest impact of the Udacity/Grow with Google experience on my life.