On Friday we graduated 21 new full stack Node.JS developers. This is our eighth class of software developers to graduate this year and wraps up our fifth anniversary year. Cohort 20 spent 6 months with instructor Joe Shepherd, who shared the class became like “siblings” and learned to work together despite their differences.

Cohort 20 is a collaborative group that has gained the trust of their peers and knows how to utilize teamwork to ramp up their skills. - Joe Shepherd, Lead Instructor

These 21 graduates spent 5 days a week for six months pursuing a career in software development (and that doesn’t count the time spent outside of class). Here is what they learned:

• Front-end development using HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS, and lots of other tools, APIs, libraries, and frameworks
• Server-side development with Node.JS, including test-driven development, SQL, and more, in a full agile, mock-company environment.

Capstone projects included dose - an app to help people manage their oral medications with reminders, Sentimental - an app that analyzes text using IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding to determine sentiment, emotion, and entities, and Down2Game - an app that matches video game enthusiasts with each other for team play based on personality, gaming habits, and platforms.

To learn more about their capstones and the graduates, visit their class website to find links to their GitHub, Linkedin, and personal websites: nashss.com/cohort20

Throughout the day graduates had the chance to talk with our friend Clark Buckner about their experience at NSS and their capstones. You can listen to their interviews below.

After a busy day, Cohort 20 gathered for their final “John Talk” where John reminded them of how far they’ve come in just six months.

See our photos from Demo Day in our photo gallery.