No CS Degree is a weekly newsletter of inspiring interviews with successful self-taught developers sent out to over 2,300 subscribers.
With a resource-packed website and job board, No CS Degree has quickly established itself as a community for developers to learn, grow and share ideas.
So for our latest customer interview, I caught up with founder Pete Codes to find out what inspired him to launch No CS Degree and what his hopes are for the future.
I studied Politics and Spanish at university, which was a lot of fun but not very helpful in getting a job. I did some work as a researcher in various jobs before deciding to go into entrepreneurship full time last year. I’m based in the lovely city of Edinburgh in Scotland and I work from my apartment.
I’m definitely part of the indie hacker movement so I prefer to build a business that I own myself and grow sustainably.
I was starting to learn to code and looking for examples of people like me who hadn’t done Computer Science at university. Hanging out in Telegram groups I soon found out that a lot of people launching cool startups or making six figure incomes at companies had taught themselves coding online or had been to bootcamp.
I originally asked these people my own questions in private messages. And I could see lots of people were learning to code and sharing updates on Twitter. So I thought it would be great to create interviews from the people I knew. It snowballed from there into a job board and bootcamp directory.
I started off with just a blog sharing success stories from developers. After a couple of months I added a jobs board. Earlier this year I made a list of coding bootcamps along with info, like which ones offer scholarships. I also published an ebook on imposter syndrome in June. I’ve got plans for new features this year including a service for finding mentors and letting developers post their resumé when they’re looking for work.
I’ve had some really high open rates – in some cases over 50% with over 2,000 followers.
Lots of people reply to emails to say they love the newsletter, which is obviously great! I do encourage people to reply as it helps with motivation. A lot of the time with newsletters you are sending blogs out into the universe and so it’s good to get a response from people.
Sometimes people tell me about jobs they’ve got from my website, which is the best feeling ever to have helped someone like that!
I would recommend using Zapier as a great time saver. For instance, I host my blog on Ghost and I collect email sign ups there, as well as via the EmailOctopus form. Zapier sends my newsletter sign ups stored in the Ghost system over to my EmailOctopus list.
I also deleted my Mailchimp list and kept the account just for the pop-up. This way I get a free pop-up option to collect emails and, again, I use Zapier to move this data to EmailOctopus. I then delete the subscriber data from Mailchimp to keep within the free limit.
Ghost is a great blogging platform, which I would recommend if you want to just stick to a newsletter. I’ve also used Sheet2Site, which is a no-code way of making a directory website from just a Google sheet as the database.
As I’m working on integrating my job board, blog, and bootcamp directory into one site I’m now making my own custom website with Django and Python. I would recommend either Simple Analytics or Fathom Analytics instead of Google Analytics – it means you aren’t tracking your users and is more respectful of their privacy. It also means, importantly for European users, you don’t need to display those annoying cookie banners.
I have quite a lot of ideas of how I can help people that are learning programming and early stage developers. I’m working on building out more resources for finding the best online coding courses and I’d like to work with employers and find them developer talent.
In financial terms, I’d like to build up the revenue to $10,000 per month in the next year. Although, as long as I can continue to help inspire people to learn to code and help them find good jobs, I’m happy.
This is an adapted version of an interview published on the EmailOctopus blog.
Thanks for reading!
Great article and really nice you also got to talk about the tech stack. :)
Thanks!
We love Pete
Awesome article @Hollie Youlden :)
Thanks Yaro!
Thanks for having me :)
Great interview 👍!
I’ve always wondered whether “Codes” is your nom de guerre or it is really your last name?
If it’s the latter, that’s a fascinating coincidence—in the same realm as William Haskell Alsup. The judge shares his middle name with the Haskell programming language 🙂.
Judge Alsup taught himself how to program and famously ruled that APIs are not copyrightable in the Oracle vs. Google case that is now before the US supreme court.
Our pleasure! :-)
Good day Hollie....Top article....re-read!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the read.