Our latest experience report, Founding a Code Bootcamp with Agile, is by Harold Shinsato. Harold is a co-founder and one of the instructors of the Montana Code School. The initial idea for the coding school came up at a Lean Coffee event in the spring of 2015. The local business community needed more programmers. So they decided to take the bold move and create a coding school for students already working at other jobs. Their students would gain valuable skills that allowed them to find better-paying jobs as software developers.
Their mission was to train new programmers through intensive immersive coding boot camps while keeping costs low. They designed their curricula using Agile principles and practices.
They held their first 12-week boot camp in September 2015. Since then, they’ve graduated eight cohorts. This March, they started a part-time coding school for students who didn’t want to quit their jobs to attend full-time. And this summer they are offering free housing to students.
Graduates from the Montana Code School have found work locally, and not only that, as Harold writes, they also are becoming leaders:
MTCS graduates have become significant champions for our bootcamp. When a company comes to talk about what they do during classes, which happens about once a week, usually they come with a former student that now has a job at that company. The former students are attending and even leading local community programmer events. And our students are usually the teaching assistants since the first two cohorts.
Harold has taken his passion for Lean and Agile values and has made something important happen. I hope you are inspired by his report.
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