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.
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Topics:
Alumni,
Community
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.
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Topics:
Alumni,
Student Stories,
Community
We are rolling out a name change for what has been called the Nashville Tech Apprentice Tuition (or usually just “Apprentice Tuition”). This program has been an integral part of how we create opportunities to launch tech careers since our founding in 2012. The new name for the program is the Nashville Opportunity Tuition. It’s the same risk-sharing, joint investment plan; we just have a new name for the program as we prepare to move into 2018.
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News,
Community
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.
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Topics:
Community,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
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?
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Topics:
Hiring?,
Community,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
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?
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Topics:
Community,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys
Nashville Girl Geek Dinner was started in 2013 by Kristin McKinney and NSS alumna Rachel Werner. Kristin and Rachel found that there was a lack of networking organizations in Nashville for young women who were interested in software development or already working in the industry. They brought together a community of women to provide mentorship, networking, and education. Learn more about their networking events and workshops and hear why attendees love it!
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Topics:
Alumni,
Student Stories,
Community
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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Topics:
News,
Community,
10 Years | 2000 Journeys