Relay Engineers

Rob Underwood, our CTO, and Tim Saintsing, our COO, are both running the NYC Marathon today - and they're doing great! Check out their times at the the link; they're both hovering around a pace of 11 minutes per mile.

By Edmund O'Neill, Director of Product at Relay GSE (Twitter: @esoneill)

Here they are again! One of our software developers, Simon Korzun, and my fellow Director of Product, Michal Perlstein, biked in the NYC Century, a 100-mile cycling tour around our fair city. Kudos to them for this herculean effort. 

Simon was kind enough to lend his hand as a marshal, helping other riders with bike problems and route info. You can see him above helping to fix a bike that broke down. 

You can see Simon and Michal's actual bike paths using Strava, a nice little bike tracking app. 

Three cheers for these two intrepid cyclists!

By rob-underwood CTO, Relay GSE (Twitter: @brooklynrob)

At relaygse we spend our days teaching teachers (current and aspiring) - using a hybrid in-person/online model - the pragmatic strategies, skills, and techniques necessary to activate young minds, manage classrooms, and foster key skills like "grit" in 21st century PK-12 public schools. Technology is at the core of our mission to improve how teachers are taught. Given our focus on technology innovations in teaching, we are always interested in new ways to teach technology itself and, in turn, incubate technology professionals.

I've had the privilege to get to know the team at General Assembly since I met Matt Brimer three years ago regarding a project I was leading when I was with Deloitte (which ultimately led to a dinner we did together at GA on the topic of education, which indirectly led to my becoming CTO at Relay). General Assembly were also amazing contributors to a Sandy recovery effort on which I was involved, NYTechResponds, and they share my personal priority of helping teach kids how to code.

So, when it came time last year, now in my Relay CTO capacity, to begin thinking about how we could identify and recruit promising new tech talent, it was a no-brainer to reach out to Matt, Anand Chopra-McGowan, Jen Abel, Eddie Washington and the whole GA team about their apprenticeship program.

Last winter we hired our first 3-month apprentices, Russell Taff and Julie Lappano. With their relevant and fresh GA training - as well as the on-going support their received during the course of their apprenticeship - they both CRUSHED it. Julie now works for us full-time at Relay; Russell has a great gig at NewsCred.

Given the success we had with Russell and Julie, we decided to "re-up." Yesterday, we welcomed Declan Van Welie to our team. Declan is going to be working on several of our key strategic projects. He'll be helping us build out our new cutting edge information, analytics, and registration system; working to create a new Drupal-based system for our curriculum design team to more quickly bring teaching innovations out to our students in their own schools; and providing his design eye and front-end skills for new UI and feature enhancements for our learning management system. 

Like Julie and Russ did, Declan has already impressed us with the technical chops he learned at GA, and quickly demonstrated the core Relay values of teamwork, urgency, respect, and - of course - grit. Clearly, GA is doing something right in terms taking people, many of who had little to no prior technology experience, and turning them into very capable developers and designers. 

This is important. Just as we have great respect for more traditional graduate schools of education, so do we respect the knowledge that comes with a master's degree in subjects such as computer science or information systems. It's not an "either/or" between models. We know our country (and world) needs innovative new ways to train and support teachers; we know too we need new approaches to (re-)train people for today's technology careers. Innovations like the apprenticeship program at General Assembly, as well as similar efforts at places like the Flatiron School and platforms like CodeAcademy, are crucial to this effort.

By rob-underwood, Chief Technology Officer, Relay GSE (Twitter: @brooklynrob) The Relay GSE engineering team is growing! Today we launch two searches:

We're hiring one senior software developer

We're hiring two software developers

Things we're looking for? PHP, LAMP Stack, Doctrine, JSON, Symfony2, and Drupal. Remember to send us your Github handle.

We also still have an open role for a Drupal Consultant for a 1-month contract, 20 hours per week.

Relay GSE is hiring two contractor positions to support our Engineering team on exciting, high profile projects.

Drupal Consultant for a 3-month contract, 40 hours per week

Drupal Consultant for a 1-month contract, 20 hours per week 

Product Manager Michal (left) and Engineer Simon (right) completing a 40-mile bike ride around Queens and Brooklyn - The Epic Ride, in fact.

One cause that is important to many of us on the Relay Engineering Team are initiatives to expand CS and, in particular, to #teachkidscode, at public K-12 schools. Not only do we feel that computational thinking is an incredibly valuable skill for all sorts of professions (not just software engineering), but the intersection of education and technology is a natural fit given relaygse's mission and our specific role in the organization. (Here's a photo of some of the Relay Engineering team leading a codeorg #HourOfCode event at The #ParkSlope School psms282 this past December).

Our friend fred-wilson has a great post today about the #TEALS program - http://avc.com/2014/04/teaching-computer-science-to-high-school-students-on-the-way-to-work/. As Fred mentions, we'll be hosting the first of two info session at Relay on April 15. By way of background, our CTO, rob-underwood, is a TEALS volunteer this year at Uncommon High School in Crown Heights. Says Fred about this initiative:

I know there are a lot of software engineers in NYC who read this blog. I am very grateful for all that you do for the companies you work for (including many, maybe all, NYC based USV portfolio companies). So it’s hard to ask you to do even more. But I can promise you this. Teaching kids to code is rewarding. It is important. It makes me feel good. And I think it will make you feel good too.

Rob commented on the blog post about his experience saying:

It's been incredibly rewarding and fulfilling to be a TEALS volunteer this school year at UCHS in Crown Heights. Watching the kids grow and grasp important CS and coding concepts is just great. I love going out there.

As Fred says so eloquently this is a critical effort we all need to get behind, both here in NYC and around the country (and globe for that matter). The readers of this blog are busy people with a ton on their plate. But each of us need to each make time to do this. It's just that important. We make time for the things we value. We need to make time for this.

Relay GSE, and the Relay Engineering Team in particular, are thrilled to be hosting the first TEALS info session on 4/15. We look forward to welcoming you to Relay and continuing to support TEALS, CSNYC, and similar programs that #teachkidscode. We salute the work that folks like Fred, Evan Korth, Cindy Gao, Nathaniel Granor, and Kevin Wang are doing to make this happen.

Finally, in Brooklyn we have had success working through and with local Community Boards (6 in particular) and Community Education Councils [e.g. cec13brooklyn] to advocate for more CS (e.g., more programs like TEALS) in schools. If you're interested in learning more, don't hesitate to ping me -- I think working with CBs and CECs is something that can be easily replicated throughout the city.

No matter what else you do today, sign up for one of the info sessions and make plans to volunteer for TEALs or a similar program.

We urge you to volunteer for TEALS or another of the many great programs bringing technology, computer science, and coding to public schools. For more info, check out the CSNYC web site and/or TEALS web site. If you're interested in volunteering but not sure just how to best help, you can submit your info on this CSNYC Google form. 

One of the most strategic processes for us at Relay is taking a conceptual idea for a course (what we call a "module") and developing it into something ready to be taught and available for student enrollment. Nearly all of our modules have an on-line and "off-line" (i.e., in person, taught at our local campus in NYC, Newark, New Orleans, etc.) component given our hybrid educational model. As such, development of a new course must consider the material presented on-line and that which will be taught live by our professors. It's a complex process with multiple reviewers, checkpoints, edits, and content types. Presently we run much of this business process through a series of largely manual steps in Word templates and e-mail.  That's going to change soon as we embark on a new project, internally code-named "Bolt", the goals of which are to:

Digitize and automate our curriculum development and release process. Minimize the need to manually post and upload finished content to our LMS (the "CP" for "Course Platform", built on Moodle originally, though largely now home-grown code developed in PHP and Symfony 2)

Simplify, stream-line, and optimize the curriculum development process - eliminate redundant and non-value-adding steps

Make this project the first step in implementing an overall content management strategy and platform for the school that will both support other systems such as our public web site and integrate with existing systems such as our Online Video Library (the Relay "OVL")

A key part of this project is the"buy vs. build" decision, which we're undertaking now, although that's really more like:

To what degree should we continue to build our off our home-grown LMS ("CP") which already includes some basic editing functionality?

To what degree are there open source frameworks we can utilize (Drupal 8 looks nice given the role of Symfony 2 within it, given we are a "Symfony shop")

To what degree can we partner with other institutions working on this problem?

Are there portions we need to buy/license?

Another complexity is that we anticipate living in a "multi-LMS" world where we'll want to create content for use in our own LMS ("CP") as well as on platforms like Coursera or EdX. We recently did our first MOOC on Coursera and I expect this will be the first of a series we'll be doing. We'll want to be able to "write once, and publish anywhere" when it comes to our course (module) material. On this, we're excited about developments towards common standard(s) that create standards (such as Common Cartridge) around course taxonomy and hence promote course portability across LMS platforms.