TalentSpace and the 2 months BootCamp program

A few months back I joined BigBinary as remote Software Developer and relocated to Kochi to stay close with family and friends. It's an unique experience working completely from home, I would save it for another post.

"What should I learn to get a job?"

It's a question I've seen a lot of people asking, often the talented ones. With many students graduating every year, only a few of them are able to secure good jobs or higher education opportunities. Rest are forced to pursue jobs unrelated to their interests with low salary or are left jobless. Interesting fact is that this happens when good companies are desperately looking for people to hire! It's a problem worth solving.

I always had a dream to build a place to learn and do technology together. Because it's more fun when things are done collaboratively with people of similar interests. I thought this would be the best time and soon put up a small website with an application form, TalentSpace.in.

Idea was to select a few passionate people through an online test/phone interview, train them in general programming and Ruby on Rails on Sundays, and refer them to good companies. Meanwhile I contacted a few companies asking whether they would like to be employer-partners in this venture. They were interested and happily came onboard. The overall response was exciting. Soon TalentSpace started getting applications, out of which 6 passionate people were selected.

Next challenge was to build a space for this. The apartment I live in Kochi has some commercial space in first 2 floors. Talked to the builder owners and they were more than happy to give a 1200sq ft hall for rent to build the office. They have a furniture shop as well through which they quickly arranged tables and chairs. Meanwhile I got a projector, screen and cables delivered through Amazon. Friends helped to arrange everything over a night and we were all set to begin!

As scheduled 6 selected folks came for the first session on November 1, Sunday. We had another session last week and they have been doing fun-to-solve programming assignments in between. Currently we have a Slack group for discussions and a trello board to manage tasks. The entire BootCamp program is 2 months long with a fees of INR 20K. We hope to cover everything from building an application from scratch and deploying it in production.

We believe in social coding, going forward our plan is to take everything to GitHub. Online code reviews and assigning with issues would give them an exposure to real world software development. Also none of us believes in certificates, the code these folks push would serve as a portfolio for potential recruiters.

It's all going great. Thanks to everyone who helped and supported to start this venture :)