Cocoa Help: Mentoring and Immediate Answers

I've been tutoring Cocoa programmers for the past two years, offering mentoring to newbies and question-and-answer services to more experienced folks. Things have gone so well (see testimonials below), that I'm opening this up to the general public. Until the site is up, you can email/IM me at <sstevenson at mac dot com> to get started.

Who This is Useful For

If you are a new Cocoa programmer, you almost certainly have a boatload of questions and points of confusion. For an hourly fee, I'll walk you through your topic of choice until you are satisfied that you understand it. In many cases, the topic of choice might simply be "how do I get started with Cocoa?"

If you're a more experienced Cocoa programmer, you may understand a good amount of how things work, but there are still areas that are unclear. Instead of googling and trial-and-erroring for hours, you'll get precise, customized answers to your question.

The Offer

The basic proposition is that your time is valuable, so paying for one-on-one advice makes a lot more sense than wasting unknown amounts of time without any guarantee that you'll find an answer.

I think some people hesitate on a service like this because they feel they're cheating. Really, it's just being smart with your time. You still aquire the same knowledge you'd have otherwise, it's just that you avoid the frustration in the middle.

Meetings can be done in person, over the phone, or over instant messenger. For remote meetings, we can use SubEthaEdit to collaborate on code writing. The rate for the service is $85 per hour, and I can accept payments via paypal.

Credentials and Testimonials

I think most people here know some of the things I spend my time on, but if you need some examples, take a look at Cocoa Dev Central. All of the "Featured Tutorials" (other than the Screen Saver series) were written by me. All of the articles listed under "Theocacao" are mine, too.

Here are reactions from some people that I've taught:

"Cocoa is designed with an eye towards developer productivity, but often times being productive with Cocoa means adopting a 'mindset' of how things should work that may not be obvious at first. Scott's extensive experience with Cocoa, coupled with his innate mentoring skills helped me get up to speed with Cocoa bindings much more quickly and painlessly then using the available documents/examples alone."

- John Fox, creator of MemoryMiner

"Scott Stevenson's in-depth knowledge of Cocoa and his clear, easy to understand instructions, and tutorials were instrumental in getting me up and running with Objective-C and Cocoa Bindings in a very short time. Scott was very responsive, and always willing to help. Scott creates clean, well-commented code, and his experience with Cocoa conventions meant that the code samples not only taught how to get something done, but the best way to do it."

- Noah Lieberman, creator of LogTen

"Scott provided not only solutions to my issues, but took the time to explain the logic behind the solutions. This enhanced my knowledge of the subject matter and allowed me to apply that process to other code enhancements."

- Michael Carter

"Scott has an exceptional talent for taking complex topics and condensing them down in manageable pieces. He has a very direct, accessible teaching style that makes learning an absolute pleasure. I highly recommend his service."

- Stephen Johnson

There will be more information shortly about the site and such, but the service itself is ready to go. Based on past experiences, I believe my schedule will fill up fairly quickly. Contact me soon if you're interested.

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