Meets Tuesdays/Fridays 3:20—5:00 in the Crescent Room. (Download an iCal)


"Love it"
- Mark Chang, Director of Product at edX
"I wish this course was around when I was at Olin"
- Every Alumni Ever

Olin.js is web development taught the Olin way. It starts with a 3 week crash course in Node and Javascript. Then, in the fourth week we bring everything together and create a full fledged, ground up, web application. With this app under our belt we get down to business.


Over the next 6 weeks we do three, two week application sprints. For each sprint students work on teams of 2-3 to develop a prototype application for a specific problem space. Each sprint and is kicked off and then judged by a relevant Boston area tech company. In the past we've had some pretty cool sprints, including finance with Intuit, music with Echonest, and government with the Boston Mayor's office. This semester we're looking to raise the bar. We're starting off with Echonest, an old standby, followed by Bluefin in the social media space, and ending with Revv, a brand new startup focusing on personal and professional development.


The class concludes with a final 4 week project. The point of this project is to make a fully fleshed out web app, and then launch it. This is the final task for a class whose main goal is to give students the skills they need to make commercially viable, robust web applications, either for themselves or external companies. With the launch of their final project every student will doing just that. And of course there will a launch party with pizza, prizes, pitches, and tears.


This is the course that we've always wanted to take. We hope you'll join us for this amazing journey.

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Weeks 9 & 10 - Revv Sprint

We brought in Revv  and with their help we ran a 2 week hackathon in the space of self-improvement. The projects for this sprint focused on both product viability and technical functionality.


Weeks 7 & 8 - Bluefin/Twitter Sprint

We brought in BlueFin labs and with their help we ran a 2 week hackathon in the social media space. The projects for this sprint focused on product viability.


Weeks 5 & 6 - EchoNest Sprint

We brought in EchoNest and with their help we ran a 2 week hackathon in the music space. This sprint focused on technical proficiency. Besides Echonest, we used a variety of external APIs including rdio, Grooveshark, and youtube.


Week 4 - Mashup

After we learned the basics in weeks 1 to 3, we showcased our mad skills by making mashups between 2 different services. Our apps were the pitted against each other, with the winner getting eternal glory and the rest...candy thrown at them.

Weeks 1-3

We started with a 3 week crash course inNode, Javascript, and MongoDB, using the Express framework. Along the way we also figured out templating with Jade and interacted with external APIs like Facebook's. We deployed everything we made to Heroku.

For the client side we learned how to add spice to our sites with jQuery and plugins, then we dove into making the frontend look legit with Bootstrap.

Here are just a few of the things we made while learning our core skills:


Homework 4

Making a Twitter Clone

Homework 5

Making a Facebook/Myspace Mashup

Homework 6

Making a Facebook caption roulette

Enrolled Students

The Teaching Crew

David Gaynor
github/runnedrun
David Gaynor has never been on Reddit. He didn't know what Xkcd was until college. Until his senior year of highschool he thought that Youtube was a video blogging service. Or maybe that was senior year of college. Anyway, even though he's a bit old fashioned, David still gets his code on in some pretty cool ways. He's written test suites for tiny robots in C, rewrote the python facebook API, and has been working on the same side project for 6 months. Wow, that dedication. Or stupidity. One of the two. He's worked for Pivotal Labs and Twitter, and is going back to San Fran next fall, as a full time Tweeter. If I had to describe David in one word it would be: "strikingly similar to Tim Ryan in appearance, but only when he has long hair".

Tim Ryan
github/tcr
Tim was born, raised, and will one day die in the loving embrace of New England. He has been using the Internet since he was just four years old, sharpened his teeth on AOL webcomics and Invader Zim message boards, and made horrible abominations on Geocities using everyone's favorite language, JavaScript. Ten years later, this became the cool thing to do and Tim rocketed to Internet stardom. He's authored compilers, shims, and trendy Lisps, developed for Intuit, PMed Microsoft, and rocked the HTML5 boat at Game Closure. He's interested in making computing more accessible to everyone, and has a penchant for APIs and platforms. Tim loves acting, vintage video games, and typography, and one day you'll find him mad, fleeing to the coast of Ireland, writing fishing novels.

Jia Huang
github/jiahuang
Jia is an excellent student, which is rather impressive considering she doesn't know a word of English. She was raised in China until her parents stuffed her into a small crate and shipped her to America. Unfortunately, the crate was lost from 1998-2003 before arriving, which severely stunted the poor girl's growth. Upon being freed, Jia was baffled and scared of the outdoor environment and has since then been stuck behind a computer. Jia has worked for multiple startups, as well as Amazon, Microsoft, and Twilio, and has recently developed a strange interest in hardware. In short, Jia is pretty small, but she could probably still beat you up.

Cory Dolphin
github/wcdolphin
Cory is that guy. You know, that guy who makes the design decisions. The guy who makes things look pretty. The good news is that he actually has the coding chops to back up his "design thinking". He's been known to make some crazy stuff in Python (and Flask), has (supposedly) made a bartending robot, and spent the last 2 summers single handedly making Microsoft a cool company. In the end all you need to know about Cory is that he speaks softly, carries a big stick, and sometimes uses that stick to awkwardly type on his computer. And he still gets a lot done.

The NINJAs

Aaron Greenberg
github/aaronjgreenberg
Aaron Greenberg. Champion. List-Maker. Name-Taker. Webmaster. Leaf-Raker. He is a California boy to the core, with his head stuck in the sandy beaches back west. A charmer by nature, Aaron woos women with his deep, rippling eyes and manages to mesmerize men with his crude wit. Be warned. The calm, soothing voice is just a front; Aaron is really a beast of the world, and takes names.

Paul Booth
github/paulbooth
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