Blog

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

When we were talking to working data scientists and data engineers here in Nashville about designing a data science program there were several things that people consistently identified as being important if we were going to familiarize students with what it is like to work in a real data analytics/data science job. One of the things we heard was that Data Science in the real world is messy because the real world is messy. Data in the real world is never clean and/or complete and/or consistent or any of the other things it needs to be for our modeling techniques or predictive techniques to work. Based on the input we received, we have designed into our curriculum and projects the idea that we need to teach the entire data science process, not just the fun/cool machine learning and statistical modeling pieces of the process. Read More

In recent years we have seen quite a few of our graduates get hired into hybrid roles that combine front-end web development skills with UI/UX skills. Most of these grads either had prior design experience or took our UI & UX for Digital Product Design professional development course after completing one of our full-stack web development bootcamps. We have been talking with local employers about their need for hybrid positions like this and as a result are launching a full-time Front-End Web Designer/Developer Bootcamp. Read More

Last month we launched our first Web Development Jumpstart course. It’s a three week, part-time class that gives students an introduction to web development. Our first session had 25 students eager to test the waters of web development. Hear about their experiences. Read More

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. Read More