Prepping for A Hackathon, From an Organizer’s Perspective. A few months ago I not only helped plan my first hackathon, but also attended my first hackathon. Yep, that’s right. The first hackathon I helped plan was my first experience with a hackathon. To be honest, I had no idea what to expect. Sure, I’ve planned…
An Update From LaunchCode
Focusing on the Need At the end of March, LaunchCode celebrated our most successful quarter to date. With 94 placements of candidates into jobs or apprenticeships, we exceeded our previous record quarter by two placements. At the same time, we surpassed our budgeted expectations for revenue generated from those placements, leaving the organization in as…
Build Successful Teams With Metrics
Ask American businesses their greatest challenge and many will cite unmet workforce needs, often deepest in the realm of technology. More than 600,000 tech jobs are currently unfilled and the U.S. Department of Labor predicts the number will grow to a staggering one million by 2020. With the baseball season now us, I submit that…
Forget What You Heard About Tech Career Paths
The effect on workers of the transition from a manufacturing economy to an information and service economy are well explored. This discussion has become so common, in fact, that a handful of notions about modern avenues into tech careers have become widely held despite being half-true at best, spurious at worst.
Crafting the Perfect IT Resume
There’s a ton to keep in mind when you’re making the perfect IT resume. We narrowed it down to 5 key tips to help you on the road to resume perfection!
How to Crush Your Live Coding Interview
Does the idea of coding on a whiteboard, away from your IDE, in front of a seasoned programmer leave you shaking in your boots? We’ve got you covered with these tips and tricks on getting through the coding section of a technical interview.
Top 5 Tips for Hosting an Apprentice
Whether you’re just starting to consider bringing an apprentice onto your team, or you’re a couple months into having an apprentice, we’ll walk you through some best practices to make sure the program is a great experience for both your organization and your apprentice.
Finding the Ability to Transform: Shawn from St. Louis
After having several different careers, ranging from serving in the United States Army to working in the film industry, Shawn was looking for a chance to reinvent his career.
Decoding Tech: A Jargon Cheat Sheet
Breaking into the tech industry is no small task. Even the language that everyone throws around to describe their positions can seem completely foreign to a newbie, and that’s ok! We’ve helped you out with this little tech cheat sheet: a helpful list of definitions about our position categories and competencies.
Mentorship Always Mattered
Mentorship has always been a cornerstone of technical teams. LaunchCode’s apprenticeships are one way to create those opportunities. Let these five experienced engineers tell you about how mentorship played out in their early careers and how they seek to foster it on their teams today.
Cashier to Coder: Gail in St. Louis
Moving Out of a Job and Into a Career A year ago, I was a supermarket cashier with a bachelor’s degree in English. Today I’m a programmer for Express Scripts — a Fortune 22 company. An educational nonprofit called LaunchCode changed my life. LaunchCode provides learning resources and job opportunities in technology, all at…
An Affordable Answer to the Tech Talent Gap
Most options we rely on to train tomorrow’s tech workers have a crucial flaw. They cost money. Today’s workforce has a massive tech talent deficit that impedes growth and leaves regional economies unprepared to compete. Near-term solutions have focused on higher education strategies and new training models like for-profit coding bootcamps. Those are important components…
7 Reasons Why You Need a Junior Talent Pipeline
7 Reasons Why You Need a Junior Talent Pipeline In the last year, I have spoken with over 100 companies about their experiences working with new-to-tech talent. I’ve heard the best success stories and some of the worst. Through it all, there’s a solid agreement that keeping a junior talent pipeline is critical, and here’s…
Employer Partner: Sherpa
There’s A Dollop Of LaunchCode In Sherpa’s Secret Sauce David Smith and Alexandra Fisher, co-founders of Sherpa, a senior living CRM platform that helps providers follow an empathetic process, tell us about their company and how LaunchCode has become an integral partner in making their company and mission successful. LaunchCode: Tell us…
Introduction to User Experience
Pulling Back The Curtain On Our UX Process We’re living in the Technology Revolution, and as we experience the change in the job market, every other industry is trying to find their place. As demand for tech jobs increases, there is an increase in the need for related jobs in design and User Experience (UX).…
How To Have A Successful Project
Tips For Completing Your First Project To land a technical job, you should first complete a decent sized programming project to serve as tangible proof that you have the required skills. Unfortunately, this can be difficult and where great candidates often get stuck. Even after studying alone online or in a classroom environment, building your…
How To Be A Rockstar Candidate: Part 2
Part two of two on how to be a standout LaunchCode apprenticeship candidate. If you missed part one you can read it here. Technical Testing and Live Coding Every company uses different types of technical assessments. However the assessments used differ, and the tests given fall into two main categories: unproctored online assessments and live coding exercises.…
LC101: Q & A With Jesse
The LaunchCode Ed Team on LC101 Where did LC101 come from? LC101 is the product of about a year’s worth of work to create the best coding class we can — one that provides a solid foundation in programming, and is also accessible and enjoyable to a broad audience. This year, we’ve run 9 classes…
Empowerment Through Mentorship
One-On-One Teaching Techniques So you want to help someone learn to be a software developer. What exactly do you do to help them succeed? Many people have built great careers without formal study but even more have washed out. (Check out this talk from Jeff Cohen at RubyConf 2016 about it.) How can you focus your efforts…
The Agile Process
The Agile Process at LaunchCode Building a successful project takes work and some serious perseverance. However, many people don’t realize that their success or failure in building a project depends on more than pure grit. The most successful individuals and teams create their projects systematically. They keep things simple and only work on what is…
Functional Programming Languages
In your coding journey, you may have heard rumblings about Functional Languages. St. Louis hosts the annual Strange Loop conference, a prestigious tech conference focused specifically on functional languages. While functional programming is not particularly marketable, and shouldn’t be your first language, it’s still pretty interesting. Understanding the concepts behind functional programming languages can help…
Ace Your Tech Interview
Top Tips For Your Tech Interview You’ve landed the interview — great job! Whether you are diving into the job hunt for the first time or returning to the drawing board after years as a developer, tech interviews can still seem incredibly daunting. You have put in all of the hard work, but the uncertainty…
10 Best Resources to Learn Ruby on Rails
The Top 10 From Twitter to Airbnb to Kickstarter to Github, many of the websites we use every day run on the language/framework duo of Ruby on Rails. A great tool for building powerful applications quickly, Ruby is a versatile programming language used primarily for web programming, while Rails is a framework for building websites…
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