dsofer

Mainly intended for London residents, but we would consider strong applications from elsewhere.

This should now no longer be the case. There are links to both a FAQ to the "Current course" materials on the website.

Link added to navigation bar. Thanks for the suggestion :-)

The first cohort graduated in February. One is interning as a developer at Hogarth Worldwide--after only six weeks and from a standing start--but he was an outlier.

Of the others, one has got a job with a tech startup, one is working as a business analyst, one is freelancing with Google, some have returned to their own startups from which they took a sabbatical to do the course--but none of them are in pure developer roles.

We are not in the business of pretending we can turn people into software developers in a few weeks. I am re-orienting the course away from the unrealistic goal of turning out market-ready software developers and instead I am aiming to jump-start people who want to work on their own projects.

This might kibosh my funding sources, but it seems to be a more interesting and worthwhile direction to go in.

ZenPro, I really appreciate the feedback. Contact me. There's a link on the website.

That is no coincidence. I organised a meetup for Startup Engineering last year in the same place that I am now running Founders & Coders. It's a great course. Good luck with it.

At this point we are not sure, but since the HN posting the odds may be about to lengthen. We will accept text applications if you have a good reason for not doing a video.

Thank you for the feedback. We will be doing more stuff later in the year. I struggle with self learning, too. Peer pressure makes such a difference. Please follow @selforganising for updates.

Good suggestion. Done.

Like you, I have no teaching experience, but have been working as a web developer and project manager for many years before taking this project on. I encourage you to give it a go. A really good way to start is to organise Coursera meetups (http://www.meetup.com/Coursera/), which is what I did last year and where I got the idea for starting "Founders & Coders".

It is part of a larger project funded by from public sources. It is not a pilot. The June course will be the third one we have run this year. We are exploring funding from various sources. We may end up charging at some point, but the model we are trying to pursue is to keep the value/cost ratio as high as we can.

Well spotted. This is from the current course. Much though I love them, we are dropping the Udacity courses and switching to JavaScript and node.js for the next one. Trying to teach two programming languages at once to absolute beginners is madness.

We will certainly consider applicants from overseas. We have a Russian, a Greek and an Argentinian on the current course. Although it is mainly for London residents, we might make exceptions--especially if you are interested in setting up similar courses wherever you come from.

We have a bit of funding from Collective, which is a project in Camden Town offering free workspace and support to creative startups, which is in turn funded by the Mayor of London.

I am not sure that what we are doing is exactly comparable to an offering like General Assembly, which is a very well-structured course and has many links with industry. What we are doing is much more seat of the pants. We are grabbing learning resources off the web and stitching them together into a patchwork of useful learning exercises and projects and holding it all together with daily seminars, paired programming and code reviews. We hope some of our students will be ready to apply for membership of Collective when they finish the course and can bring new creative ideas and energy to Camden Town.

It is entry level. Primarily, it's going to be JavaScript--both backend (node) and frontend, plus HTML, CSS, and Git.

This is a course I am involved in, but I am hoping a free course of this kind is unusual enough to be of interest to Hacker News readers.