John Wark
John started programming professionally at age 19. After a long and multifarious career in technology, he founded NSS in 2012. He believed that Nashville's technology talent shortage would never be solved by trying to import experienced developers from other cities or by waiting for colleges and universities to start graduating enough students and/or appropriately trained students. He also had faith that Nashville had an ample supply of motivated adults with latent aptitude who, if offered a chance, would eagerly pursue a career in technology.
We’re wrapping up two exciting days at the Nashville Analytics Summit where we had the opportunity to talk with several prospective students and community members about the launch of our Data Science Bootcamp in October. If you’re not on our Data Science newsletter, let’s catch you up on the latest. We received the final program approval from the TN Higher Education Commission on Thursday, 27 July. Now that we have approval, we can begin to actively market the program, take applications from interested students, and lock in the start dates for the program.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
News,
Analytics + Data Science
In Episode 6 of Stories from The Hackery, Jim Siegienski, CTO at Groups360, speaks in depth with John Wark on the availability of junior and more senior software developers in Nashville, sparking a conversation on where Nashville is now, how we can improve it, and the way to create a new mindset for companies willing to hire developers based on their problem-solving skills rather than knowing any specific programming language.
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Topics:
Hiring?
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.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
Hiring?,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
Why, from the very beginning, in 2012 did NSS make a contrarian decision to have a six-month full-time bootcamp? When all the schools in all the cool, tech hot spot cities were launching with 9, and 10 and 12 week programs, were we just out of the loop down here in Nashville, or did we know/believe something they didn't? And why today do we continue, along with a handful of other programs across the country, to feature a significantly longer full-time residential program than the majority of bootcamps?
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Topics:
Learning,
Hiring?,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
Course Report is an organization that tracks and analyzes the North American coding bootcamp industry. Today they published their 2017 North American Market Report and we’ve had a chance to take a quick spin through the stats. Since this is our thing, it’s of course endlessly fascinating to us to study what’s going on in our industry. But while some of the stats are “inside baseball” of interest mainly to us accelerated learning program nerds, we thought there were some interesting highlights.
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News
There are a lot of threads to the story of the first five years at NSS. One of those threads is our start-up story. It's an aspect of the NSS story that I often get asked about during our information sessions and during interviews with applicants: why did we decide to start the school and why did we decide to do it the way we did. Our fifth anniversary feels like a good time to go back and review some of those key decisions and see how they worked out in practice. Probably the single biggest decision that we made when we considered the business model for NSS, and the one that still seems to most shape how applicants, employers, and the community view NSS, was the decision to establish NSS as a non-profit.
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Topics:
Community,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
One of the key "leaps of faith" in the initial business model for NSS was that there were an adequate number of employers in Nashville ready and willing to hire junior developers. This was definitely not self-evident back in late 2011, early 2012 when we were designing our business model. My, how things have changed over the past five years.
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Topics:
Hiring?,
Community,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
Five years ago this week our little experiment in non-profit vocational education launched in Nashville. Cohort 1 of the full-time Web Development Bootcamp started their first class on June 18, 2012. Fifteen students joined us that first Monday to see if we could help them learn to build websites and launch careers as software developers. So we're celebrating Cohort 1 and our fifth anniversary today at NSS with some cake before everyone goes back to slinging code.
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News,
Community,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
Are you having trouble deciding if you want to shift to a new career? Not sure if you can learn to code? Do you believe you are bad at math or can't learn science? Maybe you are being blocked by your own mind. Maybe what you need before you can tackle anything new is a mindshift.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
Learning
We all know that software technology is constantly evolving. This evolution drives change in which technologies are used in Nashville, how technologies are leveraged by employers, and what skills and knowledge are needed in new tech talent. We try to monitor those changes in Nashville’s tech talent demand. We also try to collaborate with employers and working professionals to identify opportunities to help meet changing needs through training. Based on our conversations over the past two or three years we have identified two new programs that are planned for launch later this year.
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Topics:
Hiring?,
News,
Community,
UI/UX,
Analytics + Data Science