Founder Spotlight: John Uke, Hacker: Coding Academy

SEPTEMBER 17 UPDATE: JOHN UKE IS NO LONGER ASSOCIATED WITH HACKER: CODING ACADEMY.

Hacker: Coding Academy is a 12-week JavaScript bootcamp in San Francisco that appeals to CTOs and job-seekers alike. We caught up with co-founder John Uke (also a Dev Bootcamp grad) and talked about the school's approach to teaching, their unique live-work setup, and how they're working to make a bootcamp more accessible to students. 

 

You went through Dev Bootcamp, right? What got you interested in developing?

Initially, when I graduated college I became an executive recruiter. At the same time, I had an idea for a predictive rating algorithm, and you can’t work with an algorithm and not know how to code, so I taught myself Python.

I left the recruiter job and I went into the family business as a business analyst because I wanted a stable job where I could work and learn on the side as opposed to recruitment, which is really intense.

I decided I wanted to go to Dev Bootcamp to take my side project to the next level. There was a long waiting period to start though, so I took a job at Stanford teaching teenagers front end web design, C++, and graphic art like I used to do during a couple prior summers.

 

After you finished Dev Bootcamp, what prompted you to start Hacker: Coding Academy?

It initially wasn’t my intention at all. I had another startup that actually just launched- NewVo. I live and work in a space called Hacker: Hideout, which is a co-working/living space for coders and entrepreneurs. I was recruited into Hacker: Coding Academy by a couple of people who founded Hacker: Hideout. They’re non-technical so they wanted me to take on the technical stuff. It was actually one of the Dev Bootcamp employees who they talked to- she suggested that I would be a perfect person to bring on because I have a background in business/entrepreneurship and in teaching and in tech.

 

Where did you do your undergrad?

I started in Babson College, and I finished at the University of San Diego for the last year and a half. I majored in Business Management with an emphasis in entrepreneurship.  I started my first company, Red Cups, while still in school.

 

Did you do any coding in college or before?

I took a front-end web design class at Babson but I didn’t really do much coding. I did work in Excel a lot, which is a lot like coding.

 

Will the upcoming cohort at Hacker: Coding Academy be held in the Hacker Hideout space?

We’re holding it at Hacker: Hideout. We’re also following up with an entrepreneurship school. The coding school and entrepreneurship schools are going to work side by side, so there’s going to be toss of benefits from the entrepreneurship side. In tech, I’ve found it hard to communicate with developers. There are just so many factors that go into starting a tech startup, and it would’ve really helped if people had educated me about tech and if I’d been taught about code and been actually working with developers.

At Dev Bootcamp, we had to do a one week final project. We spent 2 ½ days just figuring out what it’s going to look like and what the app was going to do and what technologies we were going to use.

But at Hacker: Coding Academy, the coding school will be working with the entrepreneurs, so coders can get an MVP for the entrepreneurship projects. That’s great for the entrepreneurs too, because they will already have professionally done wireframes mockups and definitions of the features done. This gives the coders more time to practice coding and just hit the ground running to build more impressive projects. They’ll also have a real world portfolio and experience and also networking. And maybe the entrepreneur will hire the developers as contractors or CTO’s to finish what they started.

 

How large will your cohorts be?

We’ll only take in 8 – 12 people for the first “crew”. Then we can double the number of teachers and the next class size to about 16 – 24 students.

 

Will the entrepreneur track start on July 7th also?

We’re going to actually stagger them. So the entrepreneurship program is actually going to be 5 weeks long, and will be delayed slightly.

 

Who are the instructors? Will you be teaching the class?

I could teach the first month or so, but unfortunately my own background is more in Ruby on Rails.  We have two teachers and two coaches lined up for the first crew.  They are all strong Javascript developers and all have prior teaching experience.  One was also with Hack Reactor, so it’s nice to be able to have experience available from multiple of the top programming bootcamps.

 

So you’re looking to have a different teacher teach each phase.

Yes, at least a couple, and still have mentors available after hours and on weekends, too.

 

Tell us about the housing situation that Hacker: Coding Academy provides.

Hacker: Hideout is a large 5-story building. You walk in and there’s a giant hall. It’s pretty big with couches and then there’s a big room with tons of desks chairs and a projector and whiteboard at the front; that’s where lectures will be held.

We’re looking to snaz it up and make it a nice place for the community and alumni to come back to; we’re playing with even setting up a café. Then if you go downstairs, there are about 30 or 40 cubicles.  And there’s also a conference room with a big, long table with chairs and stuff so entrepreneurs and coders can have meetings.

And then there are two floors of dorm-style living that have 17 rooms. I remember when I was looking for Bootcamps in San Francisco, I probably spent a solid week and a half just finding housing and had to waste like an hour commuting, and the Bootcamp was basically my life during that period, so it’s not like location really mattered. I would have much, much preferred to live on site, and I haven’t noticed that offering in any of the other camps so I think that’s definitely one of the advantages we have.

It also makes our tuition way lower than other bootcamps because the renting of the space is offset by the housing.

 

One of your goals seems to be making Hacker: Coding Academy more accessible than other bootcamps. Do you think that’s true and why do you think that’s important?

I think there are a lot of things at bootcamps today that are really inefficient; I’m trying to make those better in our company.

One of those inefficiencies is have long waiting time for schools. Once I got into Dev Bootcamp, I waited 4 months to start. That is so much time. We’re going to scale quickly. If we have our students we’re going to open new locations, and we’ve already got about 13 places downtown that our partners are working with to make that happen.

I think a lot of bootcamps (like Dev Bootcamp) have barriers to entry because they give you so much prep work and they want you to start off at a higher level. We’re not going to have as much prep work. Our tuition is much lower than comparable schools, so it’s less of a risk, and we expect that if a student signs up and they want to join, then we can get them to a high level in a few weeks.

 

Are you looking for students who are beginners or do you want them to be at a certain level before they even apply?

Preferably beginners. Obviously people who have experience are welcome, and I assume that the average person will probably have done a bunch of Code Academy because that is where people usually start.

 

Do you have relationships with partner companies to get your students jobs afterwards? Is that a focus?

Not quite yet because we’re still new. Right now we’re more concerned with getting the school up but that’s definitely something that we’d like to focus on.  

Dev Bootcamp for example, advertised that they have lots of employers come through and visit with students, but I found that to be misleading. They said there would be speakers every week and there weren’t. Also at the final presentation, there were maybe like two employers there for 20 people or something. We kind of expected it would be 10 or 12 employers. It probably took an average of 4 months for people to find jobs after they graduated, which is a really long time. This is the norm, not the exception. So we want to train people to find contract work really well. We want to give them the tools and tricks and tips people wouldn’t know.

All the code schools, they kind of look down on contract work and entrepreneurship and such. Even when I was there, I gave a talk on contract work and got really bad feedback from Dev Bootcamp on that. That just bugged me because it’s a viable thing to do not only as a career but more importantly, as filler while they’re still learning until they get a job.

 

Will your teaching style be lecture-based or lab based? What does a day look like?

At the beginning of the course, we’ll have slightly more lecturing, maybe 3 or 4 hours of lectures and then a lot more time on the computers with people programming and pair programming.  There are also a lot of optional lectures where we’ve lined up experts to speak about data science, internet security, UX, and more.

 

Is there anything else that you want to add about Hacker: Coding Academy?

We teach a lot about working smart and getting the most results from your inputs.  We designed our school using those same principles.  We’re going to have a meal plan. Between sleeping and eating in the Hacker House, I think it’s going to really boost productivity and relieve stress to have those things taken care of. Even though we don’t start off our students with 60 to 100 hours of prework, I think they’ll make that back in the course. We’re a longer program for less than half of what most bootcamps are charging.

 

Want to learn more about Hacker: Coding Academy? Check out their School Page on Course Report or their website here.