I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).
Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.
2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.
Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.
Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.
We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.
