WE GOT CODERS

Recent alumna Glykeria Peppa made a career change, from translation and linguistics to web development, with We Got Coders. She began her mentoring phase of our Web Developer Fast Track programme two months ago, and has been developing the website of travel company Hostelling International.

Hailing from Greece, Glykeria worked as a freelance translator and linguist after graduating from university. After moving to London a year ago, she wanted to make a career move into a field that allowed her creativity to flourish and started self-learning code. After five months practising online tutorials in web development and computer science, as well as speaking with former We Got Coders trainees, Glykeria followed their advice and signed up for our course.

She chose We Got Coders because of the proven success of our training and work placement model: every trainee who has completed the six month training and mentoring programme has subsequently found a web development position.

Learning does not stop after the training period ends. She says of her placement  “I find it very exciting to practice all the things I learned during the course. The working environment is very friendly and every day is a new challenge for me, which keeps me motivated. Also, pair programming with my mentor helps me understand everything and grasp even very difficult concepts, which are not usually handled by junior web developers.”

Glykeria is the third We Got Coders graduate to be placed at Hostelling International so it’s clear that clients like our model too.

We’re super proud of Dan Steele who was placed this month, less than 3 weeks after completing his training, to begin the mentoring phase of our Web Developer Fast Track programme. At only 20 years old he is our youngest ever graduate.

Dan, a licenced pilot, taught himself to code after turning down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at university. After a year of self-teaching he realised that he needed further support to accelerate his learning and entry into the job market so he began to look for a training course and found us! “We Got Coders stood out to me, primarily because I liked the look of the intensity of the course.” He says of the 12 full weeks of training, which prepare trainees for work placements in real dev teams.

Dan is now placed at EarlyMarket where he is working on a greenfield project creating an app called Helipaddy. The app will help pilots to remember and find new landing spots.

We’re excited to see a junior developer like Dan use the skills gained on our training programme to build an app from the ground up, especially when it’s in a subject area that interests him. Throughout this phase Dan, like all We Got Coders’ graduates, will be mentored by a senior developer who will give him the necessary guidance and support.

    Switchup.org grilled We Got Coders' trainee Zoltan Biber on why he chose to join our training programme, what he gained from it and his aspirations for the future. 

He is now working as a ruby web developer with MUBI, a curated online cinema bringing you cult, classic, independent, and award-winning movies.

Read his interview here. 

Kick start your career as a web developer and apply now!

Jason Hooper and Joe Dickinson both studied with We Got Coders before moving into jobs with Hostelling International.

Jason decided to take a step in a different direction after he was made redundant from his previous job. Having had some experience of programming before, he decided this was the perfect opportunity to gain some new skills and get back into an area he really enjoyed working in previously.

Joe had been working in IT for around five years offering first line support to customers, but yearned to do something more creative. After being advised to attend a Ruby meet up in London, he met the founder of We Got Coders and was encouraged to take our course, which he happily signed up to and excelled on it.

After completing their courses with We Got Coders, Hostelling International offered both Joe and Jason jobs in web development and system administration where they both happily work together.

Why did you get into coding?

Jason: It’s something I’d done before I got my previous job as a database administrator. After I was made redundant from that job, I decided to reassess my career and get back into coding.

Joe: I was working in an entry level IT support job and eventually I got tired of resetting passwords all day!  I had the desire to be in a job where I had more creative input and could make a lasting difference. A lot of my friends are web developers, and I’ve always been really blown away by the apps they build. They inspired me to change career direction to do something creative, lasting, and where I could see the results of my work.

What made you look for a course?

Jason: I got interested in Ruby and web development, but realised after a few attempts that placing myself back into a professional role was nearly impossible. That’s why We Got Coders really appealed to me, as the course focuses on getting you employed at the end of it.

Joe: I was advised by my friends who do Ruby to attend the London Ruby meetup and network with the people who attend it. I went along and wasn’t sure what would come out of it, since I had limited knowledge of Ruby and no commercial experience, but I liked the idea of making some more friends who were professionals in the field. After going to a few of the meetups I met Dan and the more he talked about the course the more it seemed like the next logical step for me.

Why did you choose We Got Coders?

Jason: The main attraction for me was the fact that you do an internship after the course. I really didn’t want to invest in a course and then still be stuck without a job!

Joe: Before committing to We Got Coders I researched into a few other courses to get a sense of what I could get for the money. However, none of the others offered such a complete package as We Got Coders does. The prospect of going straight into a job at the end of it, under the supervision of a senior developer, sounded ideal.

What was the best thing about the course?

Jason: It was great to mix and interact with like-minded people and to learn together too. It really made a difference that everyone was at the same level.

Joe: I really enjoyed the mentoring stage, where I got paid to work with real clients for three months and had a senior developer to back us up. It was a great transition into working on our own. The coffee machine was also excellent!

What did you feel your level was like after the course?

Jason: I learned a lot but reinforced what I already knew even more. I had self-taught myself a lot of the material of the course before I started, but I hadn’t implemented or practised it nearly as well as I could have done with We Got Coders.

Joe: After the course I was under no delusions of being a Ruby expert but I was confident I knew enough to make practical contributions. Even now I’m still learning, and discovering new and better ways of doing things. I expect this will be the same years from now: it’s one of the things I most enjoy about the job.

How did working with a senior developer as a mentor help with your coding output?

Jason: I learnt a lot from it, and it was especially useful: I could take the praise for good work and blame him for the bad work!

Joe: It was enormously helpful as there are no senior Ruby developers at our company: Jason and I are responsible for the entire Ruby codebase, which is a lot larger than anything we’d dealt with on the course. It was a really scary thing to take on at first, but our mentor helped us to break down the problems, and pretty soon every issue felt no different from problems we’d work on in the course. It gave me a lot of confidence that I was always headed in a sensible direction.

Ivan Salcedo is the Operations Director for HiHostels, which is a global federation of hostel accommodation providers. After a large-scale multiple-supplier software build, they found that the return on investment with the agency model wasn’t working for them and so looked to We Got Coders to help them find a solution to this situation. After hiring Jason and Joe they have recently completed a project to migrate their bookings and point of sale platform onto a modern, API-backed, service-orientated architecture.

What made you turn to We Got Coders?

We were having difficulty on a major e-commerce project and was running behind schedule, getting low on budget and still had a huge amount of work to complete before launch! Our web agency weren’t helping us and weren’t delivering value for money, plus other agencies we looked to wanted to rebuild the whole project from the ground up. That’s when we looked to We Got Coders to help us get out of this difficult situation.

How has working with Jason and Joe helped your business?

They have been an asset and never flinched when faced with the challenge we put to them. Within a short space of time Jason and Joe were making direct contributions and improvements to our codebase, meaning I had no hesitation in offering them both full time jobs at the end of their placements.

Did the We Got Coders consultant meet your expectations?

Dan came highly recommended from people I trust in the industry, and I was impressed by his passion for web development and his faith in his students. He assessed our codebase before committing to the project and was confident that his junior developers would be up to the task. Most impressive was the commitment, dedication and talent of the developers he had been nurturing.

What was the best thing about using the We Got Coders service?

Michael Cleary had a varied career before he decided to take a training course with We Got Coders. He trained as an archaeologist at Birmingham University, worked in the civil service, and then worked at a haulage firm before realising that he could use computers to make his job easier.

After teaching himself the basics of coding and doing some odd jobs for museums and charities, he enrolled with We Got Coders to make the next step and get his foot on the career ladder.

Michael gained a job through our course, and is now the in-house developer for HandsHQ, a tech startup that runs a web-based application that automatically generates health and safety documentation for building contractors. The company is based in trendy offices in St Katherine’s Dock, London, and Michael is guided by Jamie, one of the founders of the company.

Why did you decide to get into coding?

I didn't really have a marketable skill to offer the world: archaeologists do not make a lot of money! I see the automation of the office and office activities as the next logical step in our ongoing industrial and digital revolution. It frees up people from repetitive tasks so they can concentrate on the creative aspects of their jobs, which is a big inspiration for me.

What made you look for a course?

While I could teach myself coding, it was going to be a very long process and I didn't really have the knowledge of the industry to know what I should learn, so I looked to a course to help me quickly learn how to code.

Why did you choose us?

I wasn't confident in the value for money of the big code school boot camps. They have very large classes and no investment in your success. I worried that I might end up paying a lot of money and not receiving any support in helping me find a job.

We Got Coders removed this anxiety. I could see from the class size that we'd receive a lot of personal attention, and Dan had a real incentive to help us learn and to help us find a job afterwards. The set up meant that his priorities matched mine exactly and I found this very reassuring.

What was the best thing about the course?

Definitely the small class size. It meant we got a lot of one-on-one tuition from Dan if we were stuck on something, and because we all knew each other well we weren't nervous to interrupt a lesson to ask a question. The quality of the teaching was very high and the focused help made all the difference.

How did you feel your level was at the end of the course?

After the course I felt pretty confident in tackling a range of problems, and in my ability to find out how to solve anything I didn't already know. The course taught us where to look if we didn't know the answer to something and how to use those resources. It was as if we'd been given a toolkit for solving any problem rather than taught a few tricks.

How did working with a senior developer help your output?

Having a senior that knew me and my strengths during the placement phase was amazingly helpful. It gave me the confidence to make my own mistakes. He also acted as a fallback if I came across a problem I had no clue how to solve, suggesting alternative solutions or putting me on the right track. The mentorship was certainly the best thing about the whole package as it let me keep the training wheels on in the real world long enough to settle in and realise that I could actually do this!

Jamie Carruthers is the co-founder of HandsHQ and is responsible for the look and feel of the product that they offer. They launched in 2013 and were using a number of off-site contract developers, but felt the time was right to hire someone full time and bring the development in-house. They looked to We Got Coders to help them with this task.

How has working with Michael helped your business?

Since Michael joined as our first full time developer, we've been able to react quicker to the demands of our customers, improving our product and landing bigger clients.

Did the We Got Coders consultant meet your expectations?

Dan made sure that Michael had all of the support he needed during the first three months. Dan exceeded our expectations and he felt like part of our team throughout.

What concerns did you have at the outset? Have they been addressed?

My biggest concern was that a junior developer would be too inexperienced for us. By the end of the three months Michael was more than proficient and after six months is more of a mid-weight developer.

What was the best thing about using the We Got Coders service?

                         Hacking with the HTML5 Speech Recognition API

                                           Sunday 28 September 2014 

At We Got Coders we are always on the lookout for talented and motivated developers who are willing to learn. That’s why we’re delighted to be part of National Coding Week to help more people changing careers into software development. Our free, one-day workshop aims to give an insight into web development and build an app in a day using HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript and APIs.

Title: Hacking with the HTML5 Speech Recognition API

Date: Sunday 28th September

Time: 10:00 – 18:00

Location: Tenter House, 45 Moorfields, London, EC2Y 9AE

Number of Participants: Max 20

Cost: Free

Event Details:

Ever wondered how voice recognition can be used in a web application? As part of National Coding Week we will show you how easy it can be to create fun and practical web applications using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. If you are currently learning to code, our free one-day workshop will help you to modify a simple webpage to incorporate Speech Recognition using the HTML5 API.

The workshop will conclude with group presentations and a Q&A session.

You will come away with an app that you will have built yourself, met some like-minded people and hopefully had some fun!

Current and former We Got Coders trainees will be on hand to assist you throughout the day.

Breakfast and lunch will be provided. 

Requirements:

You will need to bring your own laptop.

A basic understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript & APIs.

Register:

Trainee Dan Hassan (April 2014 cohort) gave a talk at Skills Matter on Monday about why and how he chose to join an intensive web development course. To illustrate how far he had come in 3 months of training he showed some of his code. Very brave when you consider that a lot of the attendees are super experienced Ruby developers! Watch his presentation here.

At We Got Coders (WGC) we are training you to become a job-ready web developer, and if you are on our Fast Track programme, we place you with our clients at the end of the training. We are, therefore, looking for people with a high level of motivation, professionalism and capability to succeed on the programme. 

Learning to code is challenging but it can also be extremely satisfying and at times exhilarating, especially, when you overcome a particularly difficult milestone in your learning.

Speaking to the current crop of trainees, their top advice to anyone looking to join was to do as much preparation as possible. WGC has a four-step application process and the full admissions guidelines can be found on our How to Apply page.

What I would like to emphasise here is that you are not alone in this process. Whilst we encourage you to learn, explore and show initiative we understand that some applicants will come across difficulties - we do not expect you to know all the answers. If you find yourself facing a hurdle that you feel you cannot overcome, please reach out to us  as we do not want it to stop you moving forward. Remember, we are here to support you on your journey to becoming a web developer.

How long does the admission process take?

We approximate that the groundwork will take around 40-50 hours of work and the programme challenge between 8-16 hours. If you already have some experience you could complete the whole process a lot quicker. If, however, you are a complete beginner, applying for a PCDL and/or currently employed full-time and need to give notice you should, ideally, start the process 2-3 months in advance.  This way you can do the groundwork in the evenings or weekends at a more manageable pace. 

To track the status of your application, please request a password at the trainee sign in page. 

Got questions? Contact me at [email protected]

The world's first global summit for ending sexual violence in conflict took place this week in London, at the London ExCel center. Hosted by the Foreign Secretary William Hague and UN ambassador Angelina Jolie, the summit was combined with a public exhibition, that brought together charities, NGOs, governments and activists, to help raise awareness, support victims and find solutions to this very difficult issue.

Amongst the fringe events was the first ever hackathon, aimed at finding practical solutions to sexual violence in conflict (SVC), where teams of volunteers, activists, survivors, diplomats, creatives, managers and coders got together to realise new ideas towards helping SVC survivors and improve communication amongst NGOs and activists.

In just 48 hours, the team brainstorms solutions to the ideas, and rapidly puts together tech solutions that prove the concept. We ended up using many of the tools that we have been learning about on the course: padrino, rails, cucumber, gems, github, HTML & CSS and Google maps.

After three days of ardour, hardly any sleep and a lot of fun, the We Got Coders trainees managed to get a basic prototype of each idea. Our trainees Serafeim Maroulis (@reykowgc) and Lianne Tan (@L_t15), worked on a concept for a volunteering platform, which combined Google maps and volunteer information in a Rails application, designed to help NGO's find local voltuneers and build a local support network. Dan Hassan (@dan_mi_sun), Dami Odelola (@damzcodes), Zoltan Biber (@ZoltanBiber) and myself worked on a concept to help find displaced people missing from within refugee camps, that used facial recognition technology to help NGOs collate photograph data and find potential matches.

The latter project was selected for the people's choice award, where £500 seed funding was awarded to the group. The prize went to the team with the most votes on the EndSVC website, with the majority of the votes coming from the exhibition delegates. We are now in discussions with the organisers, Chaynl, and our teammates (@miqueltubert) and (@SweetnutDesign) as to where to take the project next.

If you are an NGO, angel investor, programmer or are interested in working with us on this or any other project related to the topic, please get in touch. We are willing to sponsor a project of this kind by providing the technical expertise and time to get this off the ground; now we are looking to build on our success and take the project to the next level. Please contact [email protected] and we would be happy to hear from you.

Many thanks go out the event organisers and the lovely people @chaynl for putting the together the event (and for all the free chocolates!)

One of our first clients to employ We Got Coders trainees, HiHostels, are a global federation of Hostel accommodation providers. With the help of our consultants, they have recently completed a project to migrate their bookings and point of sale platform onto a modern, API-backed, service-orientated architecture. After a 14-month multiple-supplier software build, HiHostels found that the return on investment with the agency model gradually produced diminishing returns, and began consider other approaches to provision software development. We asked Operations Director Ivan Salcedo what his rationale was for working with We Got Coders to provide junior developers for their development team.

“We faced a series of headaches on a major e-commerce project; we were running behind schedule, running out of budget and we still had a large amount of work to complete before we could launch the project. Our appointed web agency were delivering less and less value for money, and other specialist agencies would not take the project on without rebuilding the code from the ground up. We were in a tricky position.

Enter We Got Coders. Dan was personally recommended by people I trust in the industry, and I was struck both by his passion for web development and his faith in his students. But what impressed me most was the commitment, dedication and talent of the developers that he had been working with. The project presentations would shame many “professional’ developers, and so we arranged to take two alumni for three months.

Commercially, this made a lot of sense to us. We could afford more resource than through a “conventional’ agency, and we had the security of knowing an experienced senior developer would be on hand to mentor, guide and get stuck in to the code if required.

Dan had assessed our codebase before committing to the project, and was able to advise as to whether his junior developers would be up to the task. They didn't flinch from the challenge; within a very short space of time both developers were contributing direct improvements to our codebase and at the end of the twelve week placement I had no hesitation in offering both of them contracts.

If you are looking for skilled, committed and eager developers, I strongly recommend using We Got Coders; whether in a situation where you are looking to control costs, are building a new team or you are actively looking to bring a fresh perspective to your current dev team. I was impressed by the wider industry experience that the We Got Coders consultants bring with them, as well as a resolute approach to coding using industry best practices with Test Driven Development and Agile development.”

Learning to code is akin to learning a language. It is a very important, useful skill, one that is life-enhancing and enables new opportunities for us to flourish. It's also pretty difficult. As one of the most common questions that I'm asked about learning to code, I thought I would use this analogy of learning a spoken language to examine “how long does it take to learn to code”?

First of all, I don't think anyone truly knows the answer (or 'it depends', which is a bit of a cop-out). Learning to code can mean picking up a particular programming language, learning to use a tool, developing your problem-solving skills, learning patience, honing your eyes and developing your communication skills. Its consists of many, disparate and challenging aspects that all conspire together to make a good web developer such a rare animal.

Some aspects of these skills will be easier and some more difficult from person to person. I have for example met lots of developers who are clearly gifted in their cognition and ability to absorb new technologies; but in terms of their basic personal and communication skills are still barely out of the starting block. We each learn in our own way.

The other caveat I need to make is that there is no industry standard. For all the web development bootcamps out there in the world, not all run for the same length of time; and many have changed the length of their courses after some experimentation. However it does seem as though many courses now are starting to converge around the twelve week mark.

Rome wasn't built in a day

So if we don't know long it will take to master coding, how much could we expect to learn after a given amount of time, say a day, or a week? If I said to you, how much would you expect to learn if you studied Spanish for a day, I think the conclusion would be that you would learn very little. You might expect to learn a few phrases, get a feel for the language and perhaps get a good introduction; but you're not going to get a job as a translator. I think the same is true for the myriad of one day and one week training courses. They will show you enough to know whether or not Spanish is going to be for you, and help you get off to a good start on your own, but that's about it.

Rome wasn't built in three months either

What if you were to devote three months to learning Spanish? Night and day, for 12 weeks, nothing but Spanish. Verbs, grammar, infinitives, conjugations, reading, writing, testing. Were such a course to exist, it would be rather like the myriad of development bootcamps that have sprung up. With the support of having a dedicated instructor, the helpfulness of peers working towards common goals and an environment conducive to learning, its clear to see that more progress would be made in twelve weeks. In fact, I have seen from experience that a great deal can be achieved in three months. With the right syllabus, and with a group that is broadly even in terms of its ability, a lot of ground can be covered. At We Got Coders, we cover all the fundamentals that we would expect of someone owning to the job title of 'Junior Web Developer', including Ruby / OO Programming, Sinatra, Padrino, Ruby on Rails, Databases & SQL, HTML 5, CSS / SASS, Networking, Javascript, Jquery, AJAX, Backbone.js, Agile Web Development, Test Driven Development and Git. By the end of the course, our trainees are well versed in these technologies and have applied them on a practical project. I would also expect them to be able to apply them in a commercial context immediately after the course that completed. To continue with Spanish as an analogy, that means I'd expect you to read and write Spanish, and know the top fifty most common verbs; and you would be able to work as an intern in a company.

Letting the paint dry

By the end of these bootcamp courses, I believe that the right instructor with the right experience with the right syllabus and the right environment can convey the breadth of the subject in three months. But what about the depth? That is where other bootcamps stop and We Got Coders continues.

Without the ability to apply the skills learnt during the course, to hone them and apply them in a practical setting, the risk is that the vast amount of information thrown at candidates during the course will begin to wither away. You can learn all the Spanish grammar you like from a book; but until you live in the country you are studying, are immersed in its language and culture, you are not going to truly learn Spanish.

Furthermore it is no good to list technologies on a CV, if they are not backed up with some relevant experience (not to mention a glowing endorsement from your client!). Our approach is to work with our own candidates, hiring them directly and putting them onto client projects, supervised by our senior developers, so that we can continue the learning from the classroom to the office. We continue these placements for three months, so that by the end of the course a student has spent six months learning to code, and has applied their knowledge on a real-world project, where they can prove to their client that they can stand on their own feet, and earn their own permanent developer position. That is to say, after studying for three months, they've lived and worked abroad in Spain for three months and now have a good working knowledge of speaking and writing in Spanish.

So answer the question already!

In my opinion, once a developer gets to the six month mark, they have covered a huge amount of ground, and demonstrated that they have the desire, intrigue and hunger for the subject. Yet for many employers seeking Ruby development there are few roles looking for less than 12 months experience. We designed our course to alleviate this problem, finding placements for our trainees, where they land a permanent job, allowing them the space to grow into the role and keep learning.

Once the 12 months point is reached, I would expect a trainee to be fluent in web development technology. They would be able to get a job from their own initiative, and probably be choosy about what project and team they would like to work with next. At this point, one could be said to have learned coding; for they are independent and have the track record to be confident about their next steps. So with a gun to my head, I say it takes 12 months to truly learn to code. Just as if I were to live in Spain for a year, I would also expect to have pick up Spanish.

When I was starting out in the Ruby market as a contractor, I could have done with some help finding a job. Caught in the same contradiction as all new Rubyists, I found that unless I had previously worked on core Rails bug fixes for 37 Signals, that getting a job for a Ruby team was going to be difficult.

Ultimately, I turned to recruiters for help. Little did I realise that what began as a benign upload of a CV to a jobs board somewhere, was a more permanent venture than getting a tattoo. I have regularly received calls from recruiters ever since, claiming to have read my CV (despite it saying I'm now permanently busy with my new training and development startup, We Got Coders), considering me for a role I'm not at all suited for. Although some are well-meaning, its all too apparent that most play the numbers game; churning over lists of data that would likely fall foul of the Data Protection Act.

Just as I am baffled as to how bulk spam e-mail selling Viagra could be economical, so I am bemused by the permanent and contract tech jobs market. In a market with such high demand for developers, companies are bound to delegate the task of sourcing developer talent to third-parties. But what do recruiters do for their 20-30% fee? Unless a recruiter understands the technology, the company and the product at hand, I simply cannot see what value they add. Anyone can put 'Ruby' or 'Rails' on a CV, and anyone can read the words 'Ruby' and 'Rails' on a CV. So why are firms using recruiters, most of whom do not know or care about the technology that they are recruiting for?

Companies want to hire the best developers to their teams. The list of stipulations is often intimidating, when experience, references, personal and cultural fit are taken into account. For start-ups and SMEs, to look for a Rubyist with 2-3 years experience who is available and willing to work you on less than £30,000 a year in an office without a table tennis table is to look for an extremely rare beast. Consequently, the small band of fortunate developers who fall into this category have the pick of the best jobs; and retaining staff is a difficult task. No wonder start-ups and SMEs are being priced out of the market.

Although the tendency to set the bar prohibitively high is completely understandable, what such criteria ultimately entails is that a company wants to hire somebody competent; someone who knows what they are doing and can get the work done. In reality, this more straightforward criterion applies to many more people who have relevant experience in a particular technology; but a tech recruiter would not be able to sniff them out.

Since developers can and will go considerable distances on their own to educate themselves, we believe that what talented and promising individuals need is an opportunity to hone their skills. At We Got Coders, our approach is to work with people who have already demonstrated some programming prowess with independent study; whether that be on-line tutorials, courses or work experience; and with whom we reckon we can get up to the skill-level of an entry level developer in three months. Following a round of interviews, code challenges and pair-programming, we screen for only the best candidates, and set them to an in-house training program. We then hire them ourselves, knowing that with our training and supervision, that they are capable of the jobs we put them to.

Our consultants are an ideal fit for companies looking to build their teams: enthusiastic, devoted and hard-working developers with a point to prove, with the relevant training freshly nailed to their neurons, who will stick around for the long-term, without breaking the bank. With our mentoring program, we provide pairs of developers where an entry-level consultant is supervised by a senior developer, providing code reviews, feedback, quality assurance, extra coaching and contributing as part of the team. In this way, we can be sure that we can spot the budding talent of tomorrow; even if it doesn't say 'Ruby' on the CV when we first meet them.