Blog

Nashville Software School is a safe place to fail. I tell students this all the time. I say something like, “Failure is part of the process,” or “It’s ok to fail at NSS,” or “Developers fail. We fail all the time.” I say these things with the best of intentions, but, for some reason, students aren’t often comforted.  Read More

The other week our web development alumni shared the pitfalls they found with self-study when trying to change their careers and what led them to Nashville Software School (NSS). Today, they share how NSS prepared them for the job in ways beyond just learning to code. Here is what they had to say in their own words. Read More

There are many subtle things that go into being an instructor on our team. If you look at our courses on Github (which are open source), you only get the what of the entire experience. It's simply a listing of what we teach and the order in which we do it. That's about 20% of the entire experience. A critical part of our course that isn't recorded anywhere is the group project experience. These projects are the forging fire of student knowledge and understanding. It doesn't come from the instruction staff. We just light the fire, and the students make the steel. Read More

There’s one question that all students wonder about that we don’t always have time to discuss in class: What’s the difference between C# and .NET? Students hear instructors use the terms seemingly interchangeably and plenty of them probably write the two off as being the same. But they’re not. So how do you explain the difference to a new programmer whose only experience is a few months of writing JavaScript?  Read More

A fascinating discussion that has evolved since our founding and the launch of coding bootcamps in 2012 involves the role(s) of bootcamp-style programs in reshaping, disrupting, and/or complementing traditional higher education. There have been opinions on all sides of these issues over the last seven years. As time has passed, we now have a small bit of track record and evolution of bootcamps to assess, and as traditional colleges and universities have started to co-opt the bootcamp model in various ways, the discussions have started to get a bit more consequential.  Read More

Our programs are hard. Seriously hard. For many of our students going through, NSS is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Students often question whether they’re cut out for all this. Maybe they’re not learning enough? Maybe they’re too slow? Maybe they’re not smart enough? Maybe they don’t feel the passion for technology that they hear they’re supposed to feel? Whether you’ve been a student at NSS or not, if you do anything related to technology, I suspect these doubts will sound familiar. Read More

From the beginning, students in our data science classes have worked on projects with companies that have shared data (either company data or public data) and one or more questions their business would like to have answered by that data. This provides a tremendous experience, whereby our students get exposed to data from a variety of domains while working to answer questions that would provide real value. Learn how you can provide data or a data question for our analytics and data science bootcamps. Read More

When is the last time you went on a job interview? For many of our students, it’s been at least a few years. Prior experience aside, preparing for your first few tech-related job interviews is daunting. Find out how our mock interviews are helping students with this crucial step to landing a job and why so many hiring managers and technical leads are eager to participate! Read More

NSS instructor Andy Collins shares what it means to him to think philosophically about software development and how it could help some students understand an abstract concept more deeply. Read More

Lately I have been captivated by the BBC’s Great British Bake Off (GBBO) on Netflix. With each season a diverse set of 12 British contestants gather under an enormous tent to translate vague recipes into finished baking products. This reminds me so much of software and data product development! Read More