Announcing The Techli Academy

[Chris Oliver]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to let you guys know that we have a programming academy that we are starting in St. Louis called the TechLi Academy ( http://techliacademy.com/ ).

It's going to follow the same approach as Chicago's Code Academy with an 11 week Rails course taught by yours truly. Students will learn the basics of Rails, starting from scratch and working up towards building their own applications using external services and APIs.

Classes will be held at the T-Rex building downtown St. Louis two nights a week with related meetups and events to get students involved in the community. We want to have a strong focus on startups and entrepreneurship, but also partner with local companies looking to hire Rails developers.

This class is perfect for anyone looking to learn the technical skills to become a real developer or build some of their own ideas. If you're a beginner with Rails, we will be covering the topics in depth where you will learn best practices of how to setup routes, query the database, and structure your code. We will be getting down and dirty and you'll be able to take huge strides towards building real web applications by the end of the course.

A little background on me: I've been a fulltime Rails developer for the past 3 years and have contributed to Rails core and many popular gems like Devise, Paperclip, and much more.

So if you're interested, or you know someone who is interested, you can read more about it and apply here: http://techliacademy.com/

We are still fleshing out some details, but if you have any questions, send them my way and I'll get them answered for you. Thanks!

Chris Oliver
217-408-0040
http://excid3.com

[John Hohlen]

Looks awesome!  Is the cost really $5,000?

Thanks,

John

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[Chris Oliver]

Yes, so what we're offering here is the equivalent to taking a college semester but extremely focused on taking you from beginner to web developer in 11 weeks. 

If you compare this opportunity to a college semester, you're looking at similar costs, but you'll have real experience as well as community involvement that could land you a job or give you the ability to start your own company. And on top of that, we're still cheaper than the Chicago course which is $6000. 

The trouble with university courses is that you get the theoretical knowledge but they cannot keep up with web standards. You'll be very hard pressed to learn web development at a university, which is where we come in to fill the gap. Most web developers start with an entry level salary of $50k or $60k which is a wonderful start. If you really love it, you can quickly work your way up to six figures or more.

In all honesty, my college experience lead me to almost dropping out 5 or 6 times because what I really wanted was an experience like this. An opportunity to spend my time working with other motivated people doing things they really enjoy. Most of the people in college are there because they were told they need to be there, not because they wanted to.

Expect this course to be very high energy and push your boundaries quite a bit. I'm very happy to be able to offer this because it's exactly what I was looking for as a student.

Chris Oliver
http://excid3.com | @excid3 | http://github.com/excid3

[Connor Montgomery]

Building on what Chris said…

I just signed the papers yesterday to drop out of school because I wanted an opportunity like this. I'll be working in San Francisco (with Pinterest), and SLU has had very little to do with what I know about web development/software engineering. It's all theory.

Connor

[John Hohlen]

I get it.  I know developing and teaching a well designed course like this takes a lot of time and resources.  More than anyone knows unless they've had to something like this before. 

When you're company is paying for the training is different, especially if it's job related.  It may be hard for many individuals to come up with $5K unless they have or will be getting a Rails job shortly thereafter.  I'm looking to build on my very "average at best Ruby & Rails 2 skills" by learning Rails 3 with a hands on experience.  I have a good paying day job that gives me my daily Java dosage.  Since we're an all Java shop, I doubt I'll be switching to Rails for a career as much as I'd love too.

Good luck the course.  I wish the funds to enroll, it's just not in the family budget :(

John

[Chris Oliver]

Totally understandable. It's definitely hard to make the transition when you're already established.

One of the things I'll be working on is a set of methods we can provide to help ease that transition. For example, you're a Java developer so you're already familiar with the programming concepts. We maybe be able to organize interviews with companies that would pay for your training and hire you after the course.

Considering it's hard to find existing talent, I think this kind of training is the way to go. It was much more common in the past, but the mentalities seem to have changed quite a lot over the years. Hopefully we can figure out a way to help make that transition a lot smoother!

Chris