Ex TIY employee here. I only left the place because I wanted to go back to developing fulltime.
As someone who worked with the instructors and campuses, the global team, and taught for years at The Iron Yard, I can tell you the team -- especially the campus teams -- were largely the right mix of talent - great engineers that cared about communicating well and respecting folks from all walks of life.
With that said, after the investment rounds some things definitely began to take shape:
1. The global staff slowly became more and more steps removed from the daily convo's of the instructors and campus directors
2. There were regional managers and others who were brand new to the business; the company hired mostly from outside to bring in management team and half of them never ran a local campus first (to me their credentials from prior positions didn't always matter). They should have hired all mgmt from within, as they sadly did not mirror the culture of the campus teams.
3. There's such a plethora of schools out there now competing for the same customer-base. The Iron Yard spent a LOT of time, effort, and money making some of the best curriculum I've ever seen - including its own platform for distributing content, videos, running live-editable code blocks of any language on Docker instances on the fly, and homework and review features for staff. But a lot of places competed on price and still operated without approval from state education boards or meeting any national standards.
4. Instructors needed a change of pace, as they are constant learners too. Any churn and change of staff usually meant that "If it wasn't documented, then the lessons were not learned in-full for the next employee". So, I definitely saw some campuses run into trouble because when a veteran employee left (no upward movement for them, etc because there was already too much mgmt in-place) the impact was quite hard.
I loved the team, but ultimately a few miscalculated moves and operational/strategic retries burned the candle at both ends faster than the mgmt expected.
The Iron Yard is planning a tech conference by the community, for the community – right here in Houston! We are collaborating with companies like January Advisors (http://januaryadvisors.com), Two Sigma (https://www.twosigma.com/), RED Labs (http://redlabs.bauer.uh.edu/), and the City of Houston office – with a full range of media coverage (radio, publishers, etc). We are working on putting together several other partnerships, and would love to have tech companies involved.
The premise of the event is to invite over 250 people, with little-to-no coding experience, and spend the day learning basic website development. Local talent – like myself – will lead a small group through a short instruction, followed by a lab to build something. The sweet deal? Attendance is free, and upon completion of the event, participants who didn’t previously know how to code will have built their very own landing page. Instructors and others who attend will have the chance to mingle with some power-house developers and companies in Houston.
Our goal is to raise awareness of the expanding Houston tech-and-startup scene, and cultivate a new community of professionals who bring a wealth of talent from the industries that call our brilliant city home. (Healthcare, Energy, Oil, Finance, the list goes on…) To top it off, we have local roasters supplying the coffee and local eateries supplying the food. All-in-all, this will be the perfect storm to nurture the “Tech-sas” community that we all know exists. As such, since this is an event with drinks, we are targeting college students and older – for both networking opportunities and for the obvious vices being provided.
We would love if you could join in, attend, or instruct. We are looking to get about 20 technologists who can be part of the event, and just provide a few hours of basic instruction on web technologies.
Additionally, we are looking for local companies to help sponsor. The Iron Yard is already fronting almost all of the costs. We just want to make sure the food, booze, and space is covered. All of this is being planned as we speak. Just attend and help us nurture something special (that might be able to turn into a recurring event in the future, for all skill-levels!).
You can find out more about the event and direct others to it here:
uses POJOs; has just enough 'binding'; uses routing and basic promise/A+ implementation.
I'd say this is good and as high level as one should go if they want to churn really good performance out of an app.
Keep it coming mate, and link with me on Twitter. I used a number of micro frameworks and my own glue to make my own mini-framework using much of the same concepts, only I used a templating engine called doT instead of declaring my HTML structure in JS (although I know it is easily possible to generate view code with a tool/script with HTML as input).
from the e-mail my friend sent about it:
"The code also isn't super clean, but you can see it's all just HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Which is pretty cool. No processing on the server at all"
