I took Steve's course on Udacity, my first time doing any sort of substantial web development. A few weeks later I met him at a YC event, used the Udacity course as an icebreaker and now hes my boss at Hipmunk.

True story.

What's it like to work with him?

Wait, don't you work at Hipmunk?

http://companies.thedailymuse.com/companies/hipmunk/people/d...

The plot thickens...

Without a response, people are going to assume come kind of deception.

Or they'll just assume I'm poking fun at my buddy and fellow Huffman fanboy Moiz.

GAE is really the perfect "my first web app" platform. It just works right out of the box. No need to setup your environment or dependencies to get a web app running locally, and then it's equally trivial to host it on the internet.

After learning the basics of web development using GAE, I've since moved on to other platforms like RoR and NodeJS. But GAE still holds a special place in my heart.

Any providers that have the simplicity of GAE with language support for either RoR or Node? Heroku comes to mind, any others?

There's https://www.dotcloud.com/

Steve has been a mentor and speaker at Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com) for our last two cohorts and he's fantastic. Our students love him and he's a kind, patient teacher.

Many of our students tell us Steve's udacity course was their first run-in with web development.

I took the Web Development course at Udacity too. It was probably more work than some were expecting (especially for a 2xx-level course), but Steve's knowledge and enthusiasm made for a great, challenging course.

Heh. It took me a lot longer than Steve here to set up App Engine on my current computer, and setting up XAMPP on my last computer to run a local server took a fraction of the effort. I don't use an IDE, either; I use Notepad++ for ALL my coding, so that's another trouble I don't have in any case.

GAE may allow you to set up a server visible to the entire Internet, but I think my fonder memories will be reserved for other tools.

This is awesome. I didn't enroll in the class but I love the fact that it's available for me as a reference.

What I specifically liked is the fact that they introduced and discussed concepts that I won't necessarily deal with unless I happen to be working on a high traffic app or site, which at this stage of my life (Senior student living in a developing country) is unlikely to happen. Thank you Udacity.

Steve's course is a great starting point for web development. It helped me build http://votersentiment.appspot.com :)

I took this course, and it was easily the best programming course I've taken. Very well thought out and well balanced, plus everything is better on the Udacity platform.

Great course, I watched a few videos as reference.