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.
Recent Posts
Melanie Hall came to Nashville in 2012 because she was passionately involved at a non-profit. She supported herself by applying her college training as a designer. Like many designers we have met, Melanie realized that her design training didn’t really prepare her to design for the web. She needed an understanding of how (at least) basic level coding worked. Melanie joined the second student cohort at NSS in January 2013 and today she is still passionate about her non-profit, still passionate about design, and she is a working full-stack software developer.
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Topics: Student Stories
iOS and Swift continue to rapidly evolve. Van Simmons previews our upcoming iOS mobile development class and discusses how the changing nature of Swift is causing us to evolve our iOS class. Van also talks about the rapid emergence of idiomatic conventions for developing apps in Swift, his experience building multiple major iOS apps in Swift, and the potential for Swift as a language for server-side development.
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Topics: Learning, Technology Insights
Last week, Cohort 12 and Evening Cohort 2 graduated 37 full-stack developers, marking over 293 total graduates of NSS. We celebrated their graduation and introduced 32 of the graduates to the community at Demo Day on Friday, June 24. Get to know our graduates.
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Topics: Student Stories, Hiring?
Many of our graduates come to NSS to change their careers. When they start their first job as a junior software developer, not only do they bring problem-solving and coding skills, they also bring their prior work experiences with them. Jared Fuller and Jesse Waddell both come from customer-focused careers. Their experiences in serving customers' needs will help them work with both clients and end-users as developers.
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NSS started our first bootcamp on June 18, 2012. The idea behind NSS was pretty simple - we felt that we could help address the shortage of local software developers by home-growing talent. In other words, we felt that there were plenty of people living in Nashville who had the aptitude to be good software developers. Those folks just needed an opportunity to tap into their latent potential.
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Kelley Stephens, a Software Engineer from Cohort Five discusses the importance of changing careers, finding Nashville Software School, and using her knowledge and new network to land a job at Ingram Content Group. Listen to her journey as told to Clark Buckner in episode two of our latest segment of Stories From The Hackery.
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Topics: Alumni, Student Stories
Stories from the Hackery provides an opportunity for our graduates to tell the story of their journeys from 'not a software developer' to 'am a software developer.' It's also a channel that allows our hiring partners to communicate why they hire junior developers, lessons they've learned on how to onboard junior developers, and suggestions for the best ways to help junior developers grow. Finally, the podcast gives us a way to share lessons we've learned about how to develop promising new talent, share opinions about tech education and the local talent market, and otherwise help the community learn about what goes on here at NSS.
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Topics: Alumni, Student Stories
Last week nine students completed our first UI/UX class. NSS programs up until this class have been primarily focused on front-end and back-end development. As we start to expand our training beyond software development, we decided it was a priority to add a program especially for user interface and user experience design. Three students share their experience with our UI/UX class.
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Topics: Student Stories, News, UI/UX
We are pleased to announce Python & Django as a new server-side technology option in our full-time Web Developer Bootcamp. Full-time cohort 13, which launched on April 4, 2016, will be our first class to learn the Python language, the Django MVC framework and other supporting Python technologies.
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Topics: News
Did you think NSS was all code, no color? Not true! Come meet the graduates of the first UI and UX for Digital Product Design course.
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