The first cohort graduated in February. One is interning as a developer at Hogarth Worldwide--after only six weeks and from a standing start--but he was an outlier.
Of the others, one has got a job with a tech startup, one is working as a business analyst, one is freelancing with Google, some have returned to their own startups from which they took a sabbatical to do the course--but none of them are in pure developer roles.
We are not in the business of pretending we can turn people into software developers in a few weeks. I am re-orienting the course away from the unrealistic goal of turning out market-ready software developers and instead I am aiming to jump-start people who want to work on their own projects.
This might kibosh my funding sources, but it seems to be a more interesting and worthwhile direction to go in.
Sure. I like the sound of encouraging people who want to explore and jumpstart their own projects. I feel that there's an implicit push by bootcamps to acquire students who are certain about going on to developer roles, so to see a programme welcoming students with ambiguous objectives is good to see.
That is no coincidence. I organised a meetup for Startup Engineering last year in the same place that I am now running Founders & Coders. It's a great course. Good luck with it.
At this point we are not sure, but since the HN posting the odds may be about to lengthen. We will accept text applications if you have a good reason for not doing a video.
Thank you for the feedback. We will be doing more stuff later in the year. I struggle with self learning, too. Peer pressure makes such a difference. Please follow @selforganising for updates.
Like you, I have no teaching experience, but have been working as a web developer and project manager for many years before taking this project on. I encourage you to give it a go. A really good way to start is to organise Coursera meetups (http://www.meetup.com/Coursera/), which is what I did last year and where I got the idea for starting "Founders & Coders".
We have a bit of funding from Collective, which is a project in Camden Town offering free workspace and support to creative startups, which is in turn funded by the Mayor of London.
I am not sure that what we are doing is exactly comparable to an offering like General Assembly, which is a very well-structured course and has many links with industry. What we are doing is much more seat of the pants. We are grabbing learning resources off the web and stitching them together into a patchwork of useful learning exercises and projects and holding it all together with daily seminars, paired programming and code reviews. We hope some of our students will be ready to apply for membership of Collective when they finish the course and can bring new creative ideas and energy to Camden Town.
We will certainly consider applicants from overseas. We have a Russian, a Greek and an Argentinian on the current course. Although it is mainly for London residents, we might make exceptions--especially if you are interested in setting up similar courses wherever you come from.
