Hi, I'm Yaakov Chaikin. I teach grad web development at Johns Hopkins University and on Coursera.org (1 MILLION students & counting!).
By day, I am a software developer.

While the previous posts on this site were transferred from the articles I’ve written on LinkedIn, this one can count as the inaugural post. And I have just the story to kick it all off!

As you know, I’ve deployed 2 courses on Coursera.org. They are free for everyone to take (especially if you know how).

My courses have reached close to 160,000 students enrolled (as of this writing). Many direct and indirect perks were reported by the students. Some experienced web developers reported having a lot of those “Aha!” moments. Some got their first developer job or got a better one as a result. Yay! 👍

However, by far the best (and unexpected) perk I’ve ever had reported to me by the students was a message I received from Siniša & Alicja in my LinkedIn inbox:

Hello Yaakov,

We want to share one good story with You (NOT SPAM, I promise).

A while ago I took one of Your courses on Coursera (HTML/CSS/JS). Taking that course was a very good choice! Beside learning a lot, something else pretty awesome happened. I met one very special girl.

It was love at first code. :) We started chatting every day and after a while we met in Poland. She is from Poland and I am from Serbia but I’m currently living in Germany.

Anyway… we are now dating and we could not be happier. :)

Greetings from Germany and Poland. :)

Then, a few months later, I received another message:

Remember us? :) Greetings from Germany. Picture of couple

Well, congrats Siniša and Alicja!

I don’t ask for much in return for my code match-making… Maybe just name your first born after me? 😂

All the best to you both!