I was in the very first cohort of this program. I loved it but had to drop for personal/family reasons after finishing three courses. Someday I'd love to jump back in! I highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested.
I had been working in civil service for the US Navy for about 10 years in operations research & systems engineering. It was very hard to break out of that role to any private industry—especially for the ML roles I wanted, which I think was partially because my undergrad degree was MechEng.
OMSCS allowed me to add MSCS to my resume, with additional networking and work experience details as a TA for the algorithms and Computational Photography courses. Suddenly I started getting a lot more calls back. About 6 months after graduation I had moved to the SFBay (to work for Udacity) and within 2 years I was an ML engineer at Apple where I remain today. I don’t think any of that would’ve happened without OMSCS.
Whoa! Incredible! Talk about a OMSCS success story. Thank you for sharing – this is seriously going to serve as motivation fuel for me to get back into it.
No one has mentioned it: mobile! Mobile apps became a thing, and there was a strong argument to have one common backend for your web app and your iOS app and your Android app. Plus the mobile UX (especially with iOS apps at the time) was such a gamechanger that there was a natural shift to replicate it in the browser.
That said, even though I still build SPAs at work, but I can't wait for the day that I get to build something big with Django & htmx.
I have a personal project for managing my monthly bills. Ten years ago I wrote it in React (and even posted it here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010853 - zero comments lol). Recently I rewrote it using HTMX and the newly-beta Web Awesome.
I'm really happy with the result. IMO it feels like a 2025 website should – it has animations, loading indicators, a nice theme, etc. No landing page though. Again, I wrote this to solve my own problem, not to create a product to sell.
I'd encourage folks to check it out to see that an HTMX site can look & feel just as modern as a React site.
NB: use dummy data and bogus emails – I don't want your real data.
I posted this for the htmx-curious, who can use fake emails and fake data, because you're absolutely right: no one should be signing up for random sites with their real info.
I am an HTMX enthusiast, I'm not so worried about privacy and such, it's just a barrier to a good demo. I should click that link and see something that knocks my socks off -- that's a good demo. Providing an email and password to log in for the demo would be one way to grease those skids, but I really should see something on the first page that makes me interested.
That's fair. I'd probably go through the effort to do that if I was trying to promote my product, but I'm just here promoting htmx/webawesome. Or, more specifically, I've seen plenty of comments on HN asking if anyone has examples of real sites using htmx, and there's been surprisingly few, so I just wanted to do my part and add one lol
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