If this is your first visit to WiBit.Net you may have no idea what we are, who we are, why we are doing this. I am going to try and clear this up for you.

Since our website 2011 launch we have had a tremendous amount of fans from many many years ago follow us to this next endeavor. We are extremely happy that we were able to excite so many people with our website. Some of these people were folks that were members of our original website, and some came across our videos on the Bittorrent sites over the years. I received many hundreds of emails during our two and a half year hiatus from people asking us to get back to business. Some people begged and others offered us money! Ha ha! So, if you are new to WiBit.Net let me give you a quick history.

Bryan and I met each other in a Network Security class in the 2800 building at Towson University. We didn’t become great friends at first because we were both kind of quiet. It wasn’t until we noticed we were in a second class together that we sparked up a friendship. First we started pairing up for projects, and that moved to us sneaking in a few beers between (and during) classes at the Bill Bateman’s downstairs (those of you familiar with TU know what I’m talking about). Eventually we started hanging out for fun and the friendship commenced.

A core group of us were having difficulties with some of the Computer Science classes we were in. Most of us were frustrated because some of the classes were taught by professors that were not relaying the message clearly. Some professors made radical assumptions, some could barely speak English, some obviously struggled with the material themselves, and others were there to conduct research and treated teaching as a nuisance. This frustration led to the most intense and dedicated study group you could imagine! We invited anyone and everyone who wanted to be a part of it. Most of these sessions took place at school or my apartment. We would cram as many of us as possible in my apartment and get loaded up with food, coffee, cigarettes, and teach each other everything we knew! These study sessions were so much more productive than the classes themselves. We spent hours and hours into the wee-hours of the night and day teach each other the material we should have learned in lecture. Bryan and I often took the lead role in these discussions because we had a lot of programming experience. Someone always understood the lessons better than everyone else and was able to explain it to the group in an easier to understand way. It was a lot of fun! We often would talk about how ridiculous the teaching methods were (even if conveyed clearly). We were upset that we were being asked to learn concepts with no understanding of what it is or where it comes from (example: learning java with no exposure to OOP). Out of these study sessions came the video tutorials. Bryan and I started recording tutorials for ourselves as study aids. At first the video tutorials were very poor quality and the material was jumpy. We were new to it and they really weren’t intended to be viewed by anyone but the two of us. I eventually gave the tutorial videos to people in our study group after I started seeing the benefits of them on myself. A lot of times the material in the tutorials was Bryan and my interpretation of a topic we were discussing in a class. Lots of people loved them. We got a lot of comments like, “I didn’t understand this in class, but I do now”. Our tutorials began to circulate around, as members of our study group gave them to friends that were having similar difficulties. Bryan and I were approached often by people we didn’t even know with requests to do a tutorial on a specific topic. I had tried a few times to build a web project with friends to facilitate these tutorials and create a community around them. I envisioned MySpace (which was once very popular ?) with video tutorials. Friend after friend that I brought this idea up to eventually bailed on the project for one reason or another. I eventually brought the idea up with Bryan and he got excited about it. Towards the end of 2005 we built the website and called it WiBit.Net (I already owned the domain name). The name of the site was intended to look like a technological term. We did this by combining Wi-Fi (Wi) with Bit (unit of measurement in computers) and .Net is a common development platform. So, WiBit.Net looked like a technology website name to us! Some conflict about the pronunciation lasted for a little while. People pronounced the site multiple ways: Y-Bit, Wee-Bit, Wih-Bit. Eventually we stuck to the one we use today. Of course you can call it whatever you want! Ha ha!

Over the course of a few months one of our professors stumbled on the website. He approached us after class one day and raved about it. He thought it was a great idea and that we should try to expand on it. His encouragement got us into making tutorials that were not focused on our specific school material and more based on learning how to program. These videos are known to us today as the ‘WiBit.Net Legacy Collection’. We took a lot of time in 2006 writing and recording video tutorial series and posting them on the website. A lot of these were focused around the ‘Crash Course’ mentality. Material was covered, but not sequentially and not completely explained. Our member count began to steeply rise and we were enjoying a great and dedicated community of wanna-be software engineers. Our professor was so impressed with our work that he offered Bryan and me an internship at the Towson University Cognitive Agency and Robotics Laboratory (where we got to work on some ready cool stuff).

This was graduation year. As you could imagine, I was very busy and very stressed out. During this time of preoccupation I failed to renew the WiBit.Net domain name. Whoops… By the time I realized it; a squatter had purchased it and tried to hold it ransom. Little did they know that I was broke and was not able to pay them what they wanted. We started getting frantic emails from site members asking what happened. Once I got through finals I purchased WiBitMedia.Net and tried to relaunch under this domain.

After a failed relaunch attempt, Bryan and I decided to give it up. Shortly after retiring the site we put some of our video tutorials on Bittorrent and said goodbye. Sadly, a hard drive crash forever lost a lot of our material. We were able to recover many of them, but a lot were lost (including all of our original college coursework material).

The emails started rolling in. Every single day I got at least two or three emails (many times 10 or more) from someone that came across our videos on Bittorrent sites. Some people asked us questions about the videos, others asked us to help them with homework assignments, some wanted to hire us to do side jobs, and others simply wanted to ask what happened. I kept in contact with these people for a while and told them that hopefully at some point we will get back together and start making some new tutorials. I would forward the better emails to Bryan so he could see some of the things I was reading. Some very touching ones we got were from people living in poor areas of the world. We heard a similar story from many people about our videos being the only source of programming knowledge they had because they weren’t able to afford books.

I began trying to relaunch the site myself but suffered many setbacks. The largest setback was that the name out on Bittorrent was WiBit.Net and I couldn’t use that name anymore!

I just started another WiBit.Net comeback when out of the blue I received a call from Register.com. They told me the owner of the domain WiBit.Net was willing to work out a deal. I was very interested in reacquiring this domain because of how much it meant to me. After a couple of weeks we both agreed to terms and the domain name was mine again!

I started immediately seeking help for the new site. First I enlisted the help of my friend Jason. The two of us had been talking about starting a side project for a while. Then, we brought back Bryan. We were fortunate enough to get some financial backing and WiBit.Net was back alive.

We started planning material in the summer of 2010 and the recording began October 2010. Our new approach was to build a series of courses based on linear learning so that more advanced concepts can have foundations to rest on. When we teach Java, we don’t want to waste time with for loops and if statements. That’s what the earlier courses (Introduction to Computer Programming and Programming in C) are for.

Now that you know a brief history of how we got started, you may be wondering exactly what we are. That is quite simple. We are accomplished software developers seeking an avenue to teach other aspiring developers what we know. Every time we write material we keep in mind all the frustrations that led us to start doing this in the first place. We want to give you guys information that we wish we got during our college years. We also want to help train competent software developers because we believe there is no better and no more important profession.

Thank you for all of your support over the years and we look forward to serving you content for many years to come. Keep visiting, recommending, and supporting the site so that we can keep cruising.