Blog

It was the weekend before the total solar eclipse and over 70 NSS alumni and students gathered at the school for the alumni’s first hackathon. One of the 12 apps built that weekend is called Total Eclipse and teaches JavaScript functions. Alumnus Chris Jarvis was a part of the team that built it and blogged about his experience and what he learned. Read More

Nashville Girl Geek Dinner was started in 2013 by Kristin McKinney and NSS alumna Rachel Werner. Kristin and Rachel found that there was a lack of networking organizations in Nashville for young women who were interested in software development or already working in the industry. They brought together a community of women to provide mentorship, networking, and education. Learn more about their networking events and workshops and hear why attendees love it! Read More

This past weekend the NSS Alumni association hosted their very first Alumni/Student Hackathon. Over 70 participants were divided into 12 teams and given one parameter: create an application that pertains to the theme Skill++ (loosely translated to: 'build something to help developers learn'). Each of the teams was comprised of NSS alumni and students with varying skill levels and given just 25.5 hours to complete their entire app. The results were 'mind-blowing' (as put by one of the judges). Read More

When we were talking to working data scientists and data engineers here in Nashville about designing a data science program there were several things that people consistently identified as being important if we were going to familiarize students with what it is like to work in a real data analytics/data science job. One of the things we heard was that Data Science in the real world is messy because the real world is messy. Data in the real world is never clean and/or complete and/or consistent or any of the other things it needs to be for our modeling techniques or predictive techniques to work. Based on the input we received, we have designed into our curriculum and projects the idea that we need to teach the entire data science process, not just the fun/cool machine learning and statistical modeling pieces of the process. Read More

In recent years we have seen quite a few of our graduates get hired into hybrid roles that combine front-end web development skills with UI/UX skills. Most of these grads either had prior design experience or took our UI & UX for Digital Product Design professional development course after completing one of our full-stack web development bootcamps. We have been talking with local employers about their need for hybrid positions like this and as a result are launching a full-time Front-End Web Designer/Developer Bootcamp. Read More

I still remember like it was yesterday. Four years plus ago one of our recent grads came up to me at a local tech event and said, “Thank you for NSS - you’ve changed my life”. My first reaction was shock that someone had credited me and the school I had founded with something as profound as changing their life. The second reaction was some combination of happiness for them - that they had found something in terms of career and satisfaction from the investment they had made in learning - and some mix of pride and ego that I and my little experiment in vocational education had changed someone’s life. And quickly that second part of the reaction made me uncomfortable. Read More