Blog

A lot of parents come through both our full-time and part-time web developer bootcamps. This week we talk with two moms with young children who graduated with cohort Evening 4. While balancing a day job, bootcamp, and family is never easy, Debra Gordon and Sarah Ward relied on their families and fellow classmates to stay focused on their goal of becoming software developers. Read More

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? Read More

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. Read More

When you look at the world of technology, you’ll find a wide variety of career paths. From computer technicians, to IT systems administrators, to software developers, and a lot in between. William Caldwell of Cohort 18 and Justin Leggett of Evening 4 began their careers in hardware related roles but were intrigued by software development. Here are their stories. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

Software developers are modern day builders. They do not use a hammer and nails; instead they use languages and frameworks. When Michael Watson and Luke Woodard see a problem, they want to build the solution. Read More

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. Read More