Blog

There was a lot of excitement in the air last Thursday as our Front-end Web Designer/Developer Bootcamp students presented their group projects using Nashville’s Open Data to an esteemed panel of judges. They had a week to build an app and perfect their pitch. See what they created! Read More

Two of our Data Science bootcamp students, Evan Lancaster and Mahesh Rao, and our Data Science instructor, Mary van Valkenburg, were invited to present at the inaugural Metro Data Day last Friday. Evan and Mahesh shared the insights they gained from their work with the Metro Nashville property violations data project. Read More

After 36 hours, there was still a lot of energy in the room as the 20 Hack For The Community teams shared what they built with their fellow developers, designers, and community members. Nearly 30 NSS students and alumni participated in the hackathon. I caught up with a few of them to talk about their experience. Read More

When you think of NASA, you probably think of the space race, walking on the moon, or a potential mission to Mars. NASA is built on exploration and as a result of that, they have collected lots and lots of data. They currently have over 39,000 data sets! With all of this data and declining funding, NASA is turning to the community to find answers through Datanauts. Read More

During the last weekend of January teams from around the world gathered for the annual Global Game Jam (GGJ), a 48-hour game hackathon. This year’s theme was “Transmission.” Over 42,000 jammers made 8,600 games at 800 sites in over 100 countries! In Nashville, over 100 game fans gathered to imagine, design, and build 25 different games. Several NSS students and alumni participated in the fun-filled weekend. Read More

We spent the last two days hanging out at Nodevember meeting developers from around the country, catching up with alumni, and listening to a lot of great talks! A few of those talks came from our alumni. We heard from Delaine Wendling on D3, Matt Hamil on ReactVR (both from Cohort 15 which graduated this past January), and Aimee Knight from Cohort 4 gave a keynote on debugging stylesheets. Read More

On Saturday Nashville Software School and Tech Hill Commons was filled with energy from the Nashville tech community for BarCamp Nashville. The doors opened at 8am and the building quickly filled with eager learners. With sessions ranging from interviewing, to how to speak at BarCamp, to VR and AI, there was something for everyone. Read More

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

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