In celebration of Nashville Software School’s 8th birthday, Founder and CEO John Wark reflects on key milestones in the past year, like graduating our 1000th student, and looks forward to what the next year might have in store.
Read More
1 Comment Click here to read/write comments
It’s incredible to me that we just graduated our 1000th graduate from Nashville Software School. We graduated number 1000, and a whole bunch more, last Friday, February 14 (yes, that’s right, Valentine’s Day!). We started Valentine’s Day with 995 graduates, by 1 pm we were up to 1036 graduates.
Read More
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
It seems barely yesterday that we celebrated our fifth anniversary and set a goal to graduate 500 graduates by the end of that year. But two more years have gone by and we not only reached 500 graduates but we have exceeded 800 graduates! Hard to believe so much has happened in two years...
Read More
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
Five years of sustained success and 500+ graduates is wildly gratifying for all of us at NSS. We’ve talked in this series mostly about what has happened over the past five years and why we made some of the crucial decisions that contributed to where we are today. But the energy of our team is actually focused on the future, not the past.
Read More
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
Topics: 500 In 5
As we post this today, I am being honored by the Nashville Technology Council at their annual meeting and inducted into the NTC Hall of Fame. I’m very honored to be so recognized and even more proud to represent all of the NSS community in accepting this honor. I thank the NTC for honoring me and through me all of those that are part of the NSS story. No single individual makes something like NSS a success. And on this day when I and NSS are being recognized, I’d like to make sure a few people who were instrumental in supporting the launch of NSS are remembered and thanked for their help in getting NSS off the ground back in 2012.
Read More
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
When we started this series of posts celebrating and reflecting on our fifth anniversary I said that our goal was to graduate our 500th new junior developer during the six months of our anniversary period. And darned if we didn’t make it. This is a big milestone for us. In a job market the size of Nashville, 500 new junior developers makes a huge impact.
Read More
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
Tomorrow is Demo Day for Cohort 19 at NSS. Demo Day is a big deal here - it marks the graduation of another cohort of students and it marks the formal kick-off of most grads’ job searches. It also gives us a chance to showcase to the community our newest grads, what they’ve learned, and what they can do with those skills. However, today’s Demo Day was not the way we originally released our grads into the wild. It’s something that evolved out of experience and trying other things. In that sense it’s like so much of what we do - it’s driven by experience, by feedback, and by trial and error. In other words, it’s driven by learning. Which seems somehow appropriate, right?
Read More
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
When NSS started back in 2012, I identified Community as one of our five core beliefs/values. Of those five beliefs, Community is the one where my understanding, appreciation, and belief have most evolved and deepened. Based on what I’ve experienced at NSS over the past five years, I now believe that my initial understanding of community was valid but incomplete and, to a degree, superficial. So what does Community mean?
Read More
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
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
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
Topics: Student Stories, Hiring?, 500 In 5
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
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments