The first class of the Iron Yard Academy finished its three-month crash course in coding last week, an attempt at addressing a deficit of skilled developers in the local tech community. Two of the seven students decided to make Greenville home.
The intensive code education school kicked off in April with the promise that after three months, students would be able to build impressive websites and Web products, no matter what their prior experience.
To help them along, each was given an apartment, bicycle and Apple laptop. The Iron Yard also promised that those who took the job placement option would have a well-paid position within six months or they could have their tuition back.
Seven students debuted final projects in various states of completion at the Iron Yard’s CoWork space before a small crowd. Their instructor, Mason Stewart, said they had planned for up to 10 students, but seven had allowed a great deal of individual attention. He was proud and pleasantly surprised at the aptitude the group displayed.
“Our goal with the academy was to create engineers who could build the future,” Stewart said, assuring the audience that the graduates were now “San Francisco-flavored, real, cutting-edge technologists.”
Student Andrew McIntee showed a “dream archive” program that would aggregate and map user-submitted information about what they dreamt while asleep. He came to the program with previous Web design experience.
“I was doing some design and interface development and building some pretty crappy websites,” he said by way of introduction. Now he will work for the Iron Yard, which hired him to be the Academy’s teaching assistant starting with the next class.
Some students want to work for themselves as freelance designers; others are looking for a company. Still others wanted to learn code to augment work in other fields.
Enrique Acevedo had left a job at J.P. Morgan in New York to join a startup only to discover the difficulty of finding a developer. “Why pay an agency and go through the process of laying (the business) out for them when I can do it myself?” he said.
Lindsey McDougall came from a real estate company in Toronto to learn skills she would take back to work. She continued to work full-time remotely while in the academy. She created a website that maps open houses to help people shop for homes more efficiently and easily. It will essentially be used as a marketing tool, and having an in-house developer greatly reduces the cost.
With no prior experience, McDougall said the learning curve was the steepest of any challenge she’d ever undertaken. “I’ve learned languages and instruments, and this was hard.” Yet Stewart had singled her out as possibly the best student for the elegance of her code.
She said the academy taught her a lot about the user experience, and she will spend the next year “digesting” the different facets of developing.
