Tag: Codeup

Showcasing New Programmers at CodeUp’s Demo Day

August 1, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Greg McCabe, Michael Jaime and Caitlin Daily, creators of Pro-Sifter at CodeUp Demo Day

Michael Jaime sold his car and bought a bike so he could pay his tuition and participate in CodeUp, a 12-week bootcamp that teaches non-programmers how to code.

Each day Jaime would bike three miles to Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio to learn a hodgepodge of programming languages including JavaScript, SQL, HTML and PHP.

On Wednesday, Jaime and his team showed off their newly acquired skills during a presentation of their capstone project, Pro-Sifter, a web app that allows users to find professional hairstylists, makeup artists and more and to rate and review them.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Jaime said. “I’ve always been interested in web development.”

Jaime was one of 23 students in the latest CodeUp program. They graduated on Wednesday and presented their projects at the Pearl Studio to a standing-room only crowd of more than 70 potential employers.

This is the second CodeUp class to graduate. The first class graduated in April. Out of that class, 25 of the 27 students have found employment or have made money as programmers, said Michael Girdley, co-founder of CodeUp. They’ve gotten jobs with Labatt Foods, Parlevel, Heavy-Heavy and various web development shops, he said.

Passion and determination are the qualities that make good CodeUp students, he said.

“These people have all had to make life sacrifices to be here,” he said. “They self-select. Those are the traits of being a good employee. They are the type of people you want to hire.”

CodeUp costs $9,875 for a 12-week program. Some of the students use a Crowdfunding portal to raise the money for tuition. CodeUp refunds half of the tuition if a student is able to find a job within six months.

“It’s a way to get behind someone when they’re changing their life,” Girdley said.

Kyle Cornelius, co-founder of Storific, a mobile application for ordering food from restaurants, attended the CodeUp Demo Day to scope out the talent.

“Codeup is a terrific bootcamp because they come in prepared and ready,” he said. “The skills that they learned are all things we use.“

Storific is looking to hire two backend developers, Cornelius said.

“Most of the people here do fit the bill,” he said. “We’re just trying to find people who share the same passion with us.”

Chad Keck, CEO and founder of Promoter.io, a company feedback system based on the Net Promoter Score, planned to interview some of the jobs candidates in the next few days. He’s hiring a full stack engineer, a front-end engineer and a junior developer.

Andre Dempsey, Nicole Sumrall and Andrew Samaniego with Tweets for Charity project at CodeUp Demo Day.

Nicole Sumrall worked on the Tweets for Charity program, a Web application that allows Twitter users to donate to selected charities by tracking the number of tweets they post in a month and a per-tweet donation tied to that number.

She joined CodeUp to change the direction of her life. She previously worked at Best Buy in the cell phone department while pursuing her graduate degree. She has a B.S. from UTSA and a M.S. in English literature from Texas A&M in San Antonio.

“When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get into a Ph.D. program, technology was the next best thing.,” Sumrall said. “ I really enjoy creating things. It gives me a creative outlet in programming. I learned about CodeUp from a friend and then I applied.”

And she’s glad she did. The program opened her up to new ideas. And now she’s eager to pursue a job as a web developer.

One of Cole Reveal’s roommates had previously enrolled in the last CodeUp class.

“I saw the culture that was at Geekdom and it just blew my mind. It was something I had to gear my life toward,” Reveal said.

His team’s capstone project was Diversity Thread, a “resource for potential employees looking to get noticed specifically designed for minorities and women.”

Reveal has a math degree but he was working at a New Balance store, selling shoes. He wanted a more challenging career.

“This gave me new skills,” Reveal said. The program helped Reveal sharpen his problem solving skills and broadened his ability to acquire information, he said.

“CodeUp has opened our eyes,” he said. “The instruction here is unmatched.”

Justin Mason also worked on the Diversity Thread project also, which he calls a “diversity” LinkedIn.

“For the past few three years I ran a tech company without any technical skills myself. I paid a lot of contractors,” Mason said.

He worked on his startup, Vela, out of Geekdom for the past year and half. He started it in Southern California.

The CodeUp program gave him the skills he needed to program his own site. He no longer needs to hire programmers. He’s now looking for a job as a web developer.

“This was empowering,” Mason said.

Caitlin Daily earned a degree in nuclear medicine from Incarnate Word, but she couldn’t find a job. She decided to enroll in CodeUp and she found her passion.

“I wanted to stay in San Antonio,” Daily said. “I needed something quick to get me into new fields. “

She worked on the Pro-Sifter project. Now she’s looking for a job as a web developer specializing in back end development. She feels like CodeUp prepared her for a career in coding.

“I have no fear going into any interview,” she said.

Frank Pigeon retired from the military in 2003 as a computer operator and analyst and works at Fort Sam Houston as a civilian project engineer. But he always wanted to learn how to code.

“I came to the last Demo day and I was blown away by the projects I saw and I said I’ve got to do this,” Pigeon said.

So he enrolled in CodeUp. His team’s capstone project, Community-Helpers, is “a web application that connects seniors with odd-jobs done around their house to the youth in their community who are ready to earn some money.”

“A few months ago I would never have the tools to accomplish this,” he said.

Ashley Webb, Greg Vallejo and Daniel Jimenez, with the ChartBabe team at CodeUp Demo Day

Ashley Webb got introduced to coding through her WordPress blog, LeonaLovely.

At CodeUp, she worked on a capstone project, ChartBabe, a way for new moms to track all of their babies’ activities electronically including feedings, diaper changes and naps.

Webb plans to continue working on the project and adding new features, including creating a mobile phone app. Webb’s son, Jasper, is 18 months old. Her second child is due in November. Coding provides her with flexibility.

“It seemed like a big price tag at first,” she said. “I don’t even have a job yet and I already know it was worth it. I can’t believe the knowledge I’ve gained in 12 weeks.”

CodeHS Turns Kids Into Coders

May 21, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Students who excelled at the inaugural CodeHS program at Highlands High School.

In the first CodeHS program at Highlands High School this year, Ernest Rodriguez learned to program a computer and to do animation.

“I saw the opportunity and I took advantage of it,” said Rodriguez, a freshman.

Now he wants to be a computer programmer and work at Rackspace Hosting some day, he said.

Rodriguez not only completed the program, but also excelled at it, said Chelsey Cook, CodeHS coordinator at Highlands. The students earn points for completing coursework. They expected students to earn about 100 points by the end of the year. Rodriguez earned more than 600 points.

On Tuesday, Rodriguez and 27 other students, the outstanding performers in the class from Highlands, took a field trip to Rackspace to tour the high tech campus in San Antonio. They also gave a brief presentation demonstrating some of the skills they learned in the program.

This past school year, the entire freshman class at Highlands High School, more than 450 students, in the San Antonio Independent School District, participated in CodeHS, a web-based platform to teach kids to code. Rackspace Hosting’s Chairman Graham Weston’s 80/20 Foundation provided a grant to fund the program.

The coursework teaches the students how to write their own code through interactive games, which then progress into more complex projects and lessons. The program includes dozens of tutorial videos and hands on training.

“I learned that even if there’s something wrong with your computer, you can fix it and understand it,” said Lucinda Angel, a freshman at Highlands. “I feel so connected to the computer.“

For many people, understanding computers is difficult, Angel said.

“But since we’ve been working on it all year, I understand its language now,” she said.

Angel wants to be a lawyer and she’s hoping she can get a job working for Rackspace.

“I’m not a geek or anything,” she said. “But geeks rule.”

CodeHS motivated the students and expanded their horizons, said Joan Jackson, CodeHS teacher.
“This exposed them to so much more,” Jackson said.

A lot of students’ talents came out during CodeHS, said Cook, the program’s coordinator. Some of the students who got average grades in other courses, excelled in CodeHS, she said. And the computer programming coursework helped complement what the students learned in other classes like math and science, she said.

The CodeHS program lets students work at their own pace, Cook said. It also prepares them for college and for the workforce for computer programming jobs that are in demand.

“If they don’t get exposure in high school, they are less likely to know about those opportunities when they get in college,” she said.

Next year, the students who have gone through the program will take advanced computer programming and will serve as mentors to the freshman taking the Code HS course, Cook said.

“We really strongly believe in the model that CodeHS has set up,” said Daniel Sherrill, spokesman with Rackspace.

“We’re looking for ways for our Rackers to further engage with the kids,” Sherrill said.
Rackspace is also interested in applying the CodeHS model to others schools in San Antonio, Sherrill said.

“Anything that is creating that future talent pipeline is something Rackspace is interested in,” he said.
In June, Rackspace will host a high school hackathon with more than 500 students. It’s inviting kids from CodeHS to participate in the hackathon, Sherrill said.

“It’s an opportunity for students to connect with other students from all over who are passionate about code,” Sherrill said.

“We are thrilled with our partnership with San Antonio ISD and Highlands High School,” said Scott Meltzer, deputy director with the 80/20 Foundation. The San Antonio CodeHS program is the second largest in the country, he said.

The CodeHS program will continue next year in a “targeted and focused manner” with about 150 freshman and sophomore students at Highlands High School, Meltzer said. The program focuses on preparing the students to enter a job-training program like Cloud Academy or CodeUp in San Antonio or to go on to pursue a college degree, he said.

The CodeHS program is directly connected to San Antonio’s workforce needs, Meltzer said.

“It’s the next step on their pathway to pursuing high tech jobs in San Antonio,” Meltzer said.

Codeup Bootcamp Aims to Turn Non-techies into Web Programmers

April 4, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 7 Comments

By ZACH REED
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photos courtesy of Codeup and Geekdom

Nathaniel Medrano wrapped up a recent internship feeling that, while the experience gave him great exposure, the job’s DIY learning model-via telecommute no less-still had him looking for ingrained traction in the technology. His work setting up search engines for local directories at a telecommunications company had given him a taste for the role and its tasks, but now he wanted a bootcamp experience that would help him understand the “why.”

He chose Codeup, an immersive 12-week cohort program launched out of the Geekdom tech startup incubator in downtown San Antonio. “Iron sharpens iron…and Codeup gave me exactly what I was looking for,” Medrano said. He graduates in a few weeks. The program “strengthened what I did know, and filled in all the gaps.”

Citing a Bureau of Labor Statistics study that job growth for developers is expected to grow 30 percent between 2010 and 2020, Codeup bills itself as an “in-person bootcamp that takes you from non-techie to web programmer.” It targets would-be web developers who are early career or second career with an intensive program that combines instructor-led training and self-study. Graduates are guaranteed that if they don’t land a job within six months, half their tuition will be refunded.

Fresh off the glow of his team winning the 2014 InnoTech Beta Summit, CEO Michael Girdley talked about what differentiates Codeup from courses available in community colleges and other bootcamps. “All a computer science degree gives you is theory, and then someone has to pay you to learn what to do with it,” he said. The value that Codeup tries to provide graduates and employers is “we cut out those first three years” that newly-minted web developers normally spend cutting their teeth on applied learning, Girdley said. A list of 55 employers formally recruit from Codeup, ranging from other Geekdom startups to established firms such as Globalscape and Labatt Food Service.

The typical student experience starts with a considerable amount of prep work even before the first class. “You’re coding within the first 45 minutes of Day One,” Girdley said. Subsequently, most days include six hours of classroom training, bookended by several hours of study hall where instructors are still available for assistance. Codeup punctuates the learning with lunchtime speakers, and recently held a hackathon competition. Throughout the 12-week course, students are continually assigned textbook reading. The emphasis is a hands-on learning of Lavarel, as PHP used in the creation of hundreds of millions of websites.

It’s an immersive, structured curriculum that Medrano was able to root in: “It filled that space between the ‘Pythagoras Theorem’ and ‘Here’s what to do,” Medrano said. He likens it to learning a new language, with the immediate focus on code that is immediately functional, “worrying about syntax later”. He particularly likes that the learning is iterative: material covered in the first week is used as a core that is continually revisited and built up from.

The next cohort of 30 students starts May 6th and is already half full, with 15 applications accepted out of 70 submitted, Girdley said. The review process involves a round of interviews with Codeup instructors. “What we ask ourselves during the interview process is ‘Can we help?’ and ‘What is their learn rate?” Girdley said. “I also want people I’m willing to be locked up with in a room all day,” he added with a good-natured laugh.

Prospective students can watch the current class via livestream or in-person, as well as read the team’s bios. The Codeup team includes four Instructors and three Lab Associates. “You’ve got a very experienced team here,” said Girdley, who has written four textbooks.

Codeup Wins the 2014 San Antonio InnoTech Beta Summit

April 2, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Michael Girdley with Codeup, Bill Mock, senior vice president of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, Brandon Ashton with SocialRest and Marcus Robertson with TrueAbility.

Michael Girdley with Codeup, Bill Mock, senior vice president of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, Brandon Ashton with SocialRest and Marcus Robertson with TrueAbility.

Codeup, a 12-week boot camp to teach technical skills to people, won the 2014 InnoTech Beta Summit on Wednesday afternoon.

Michael Girdley launched Codeup last year and the first class of 28 men and women is about to graduate.

Michael Girdley, founder of Codeup

The startup, based at Geekdom, charges $9,850 per student, which ensures that the students are committed and motivated to completing the coursework, Girdley said. The company also guarantees its graduates will find a job or it will refund 50 percent of their tuition.

The runners up were TrueAbility and SocialRest.

The other companies pitching included InnerAlly, Picture It Settled, Remote Garage and Biovideo. Each company gave a five-minute pitch followed by a few minutes of questions from the judges.

The judges were Pat Matthews, co-founder of Webmail.us, Rackspace executive and investor, Sharon O’Malley Burg, a technology consultant and Erach Songodwala, an angel investor.

Marcus Robertson, co-founder and chief technology officer of TrueAbility, presented the startup, which lets technical job candidates demonstrate their skills to potential employers through its AbilityScreen. TrueAbility also has a jobs board and charges companies to post a job and screen candidates through its platform.

SocialRest has created software that measures how effective a company’s content is by measuring how it is shared on social media and how many sales result.

The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce sponsored the InnoTech Beta Summit and gave the winner a plaque and a one-year membership in its organization. The winners and runners up also received trophies.

Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News also helped to organize and host the InnoTech Beta Summit and InnoTech is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.

Soloshot, BiblioTech, Cloud Academy and SMSGate at SA New Tech

April 2, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

On the first Tuesday of every month, a group of people interested in the latest technology developments in San Antonio gathers at Geekdom for the San Antonio New Tech meetup.
The hour-long program showcases some of the latest startups in the city along with other interesting projects.
Cole Wollak, Jeremy Karney and Michael Girdley head up SA New Tech, which has grown to become one of the city’s most popular meetups with 672 registered members. SA New Tech has held 19 events since its founding more than two years ago.
On Tuesday, Geekdom and Codeup sponsored the event providing free beer and pizza to the more than 70 people in attendance.
Soloshot, a robotic cameraman, SMS Gate, a marketing messaging service, Open Cloud Academy, a Linux administrator and technical training center, and BiblioTech, the nation’s first all digital library, pitched to the crowd for five minutes and then answered questions from the crowd.
Chris Boyle, co-founder and CEO of Soloshot, a tripod device that allows a camera to track and film a subject automatically, gave an update on his company.
Soloshot is on the second generation of its product, the Soloshot2, the robot cameraman. The latest model includes new features such as vertical tracking, camera control for automatic zooming and start/pause recording, a smaller lighter transmitter and compatibility with third-party professional tripods.
The San Antonio-based company now has 15 employees. It also has 19 patents issued or pending and its product is available in more than 200 retail stores.
Soloshot has been featured in Popular Mechanics, the Discovery Channel, Fast Company magazine, TechCrunch and other publications. It has won several prestigious industry awards. Soloshot also won the 2013 InnoTech Beta Summit.
Soloshot, founded in 2012, originally sold its products to sports enthusiasts and professional athletes in the surfing, kiteboarding sports. But others quickly adopted its device to film snowboarders, soccer players, rugby teams, equestrians, skiers, wakeboarders, skateboarders, motocross racers, racecar drivers and parents seeking to capture their kid’s events.
Catarina Velasquez, BiblioTech Community relations liason, gave a brief overview of BiblioTech, which has more than 20,000 digital books available for download to Bexar County residents. It’s the nation’s first digital public library.
The $2.5 million library has 48 iMacs and it loans e-readers, which can hold up to five books to county residents with a BiblioTech library card. The library is open seven days a week and is located on the city’s South Side at 3505 Pleasanton Road.
Felipe Castillo pitched his startup, SMSGate, which provides a direct marketing service to companies through text messages. The company is from Mexico. The company is looking for Beta testers to try out its product for free. For more information, visit its website at SMSGate.co.
A representative from the Open Cloud Academy, on the sixth floor of the Weston Centre, gave a brief overview of the year-old technical training center. Rackspace’s Chairman and CEO Graham Weston started the academy to provide Linux administrator training to the general public. The program is based on the Rackspace Academy, which trains its employees in technical fields. The 10-week Linux Administrator training program costs $3,500 and the program provides some scholarships and other financing. Recently, the Open Cloud Academy launched Linux for Ladies, its first program targeted exclusively at training women to become Linux system administrators. That class, which begins in June, is already full. The demand is high for the classes. Jobs for Linux system administrators are plentiful and the jobs pay more than $50,000 a year, on average. More than 200 people attended an information session to learn more about the Linux for Ladies program.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Seven San Antonio Startups to Pitch at the InnoTech Beta Summit

March 30, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Seven startups will pitch at the eighth annual InnoTech Beta Summit on Wednesday.
The event, which takes place at 3 p.m. at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, will showcase some of the best and brightest new technology startups in San Antonio.
Each team will have five minutes to pitch their venture before a panel of judges. The winner will get a plaque from the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and a one-year membership in the organization.
The winner will also receive a trophy from Silicon Hills News and second and third place winners will also receive a prize.
Soloshot, a startup that makes a tripod system that automatically keeps a camera trained on a subject, won the InnoTech Beta Summit last year. And in 2012, CallGrader, a company that makes software to track sales calls, won.
Silicon Hills News readers can attend InnoTech, the day long technology conference at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center for free by using the discount code BETA99 to register.
The judges for this year’s event include Pat Matthews, co-founder of Webmail.us, investor, Sharon O’Malley Burg, a technology consultant and Erach Songodwala, an angel investor.
The startups pitching include:

Codeup – is an intensive, 12-week live bootcamp that turns non-techies into computer programmers. “We all know education is broken,” according to the company. “Our solution is unique, aggressive and it works in providing our students a real future. We have 47 partner employers ready to look at our graduates.”

Picture It Settled – which bills itself as “Moneyball for negotiation.” “The behavioral software has learned negotiating patterns from parties to thousands of litigated cases in a wide variety of jurisdictions and claim types,” according to the company. “It uses that intelligence to make accurate predictions of where a negotiating round is headed in time for parties to act on it using the program’s planning tools.”

Remote Garage – a storage service backed by the Rackspace founders’ Geekdom Fund. The company picks up customers’ belongings, stores them, and delivers them back on demand. The inventory is available to view online.

TrueAbility – a community for technical professionals to learn, grow and (im)prove their skills. Its assessment platform, AbillityScreen, is a job simulator allowing tech pros to practice in a live environment. “Its job board helps companies validate the skills of job seekers, simplify the hiring process with stacked rankings, and enables tech pros to prove their skills by taking a technical interview in a real environment–from anywhere,” according to the company. TrueAbility graduated from the Techstars Cloud accelerator and has landed venture funding.

InnerAlly – is a platform that lets people perform simple actions to stabilize their mental health. “Every year billions of dollars are forfeited to lost productivity of employees suffering from depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues,” according to the company. “By empowering workers to maintain their mental health we can dramatically reduce those losses.”

SocialRest– A software tool that helps businesses measure their return on investment for social media. The software tracks how “content is being shared across Facebook and Twitter; but even more valuable is the fact that SocialRest is also able to identify revenue generated because of this shared content,” according to the company.

Biovideo– “provides new parents a priceless gift – a breathtaking movie, set to music, of their baby’s first day of life,” according to the company. “It films and creates more than 3,000 such personalized movies each month – delivered before the new family leaves the hospital.”

Innotech is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News

Lessons of a First Time CEO at SA New Tech

December 4, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Jay Miltor presents XYN Technologies, photo by Andrew Moore

Jay Miltor presents XYN Management, photo by Andrew Moore

At SA New Tech Tuesday, Pressable’s Founder Vid Luther shared tough lessons learned as a CEO.
Originally named ZippyKid, Pressable, a WordPress hosting startup, got a new name following an eight hour meeting, scheduled to last 30 minutes, in June with Rackspace Hosting founder Dirk Elmendorf and a few others. After much consideration, Luther decided that the “Kid” in ZippyKid targeted the wrong demographic and didn’t leave a professional and reliable impression.
Now named Pressable, the startup has changed its web layout and pricing to target a more professional demographic – namely other web developers. The rate is now $25 to manage up to five sites, instead of only one, so web developers can use Pressable on the backend for website stability, speed, and security on their client’s websites.
“Rather than us managing a client one by one, they manage clients and we make them look good,” Luther said.
Five days after the changes, Pressable began to see more customers sign up and has enjoyed a brisk signup rate ever since. To date, Pressable boasts more than $1 million in yearly revenue and has around 1,200 customers.
Luther also gave advice on what a CEO should, and should not, do to have a successful business.

Raise more money than you think you need.
Hire smart people and then get out of their way.
Have a mission, a vision, and a value proposition, and make sure your employees share them.
Learn to speak to investors, marketers, and non-technical employees in language that they will understand.
Be personable and smile! Your face is the face of the company.
Spend more money on things that generate revenue, like marketing.
Have confident body language.
How you think about your customers is how your employees will think about your customers.
Don’t make self deprecating jokes as a CEO, important listeners might not know you are joking.
Don’t use sarcastic humor as a CEO; new employees may take you seriously.
Don’t assume that you are 100 percent responsible for your employee’s livelihood; they should know what they are getting into with a startup.

In addition to Luther’s presentation, Michael Girdley touted his Codeup boot camp, XYN Management employee explained its statistics solution for hospitals organ transplants and a Southwest Research Institute engineer shared an open source robotics code.

Codeup

Codeup is a nine week in-person web development boot camp that guarantees to either get their graduates a job or refunds half of their tuition. The boot camp was created by Entrepreneur Michael Girdley because, well, he “got mad”.
“I’m mad that our educational system is so broken,” Gridley said. “I’m mad that people like Vid and all my friends who run companies can’t hire good people. And then I was mad that I had all these friends that wanted to be programmers but kept failing. I also like teaching.”
Teaching oneself to be a programmer is difficult, and Girdley found that most people either did not know where to start or were unsure what to teach them.
The boot camp, which begins on Feb. 3, costs $7,985 and will cover Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and JavaScript. The classes will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Students will spend only 45 minutes to an hour in lecture each day and will devote the rest of the time to applying what they learned. Girdley has already received 50 applications and has accepted 17. His first class still has a few more spots left. To get more women involved in web development, Codeup is offering three half-off women’s scholarships.
There will be a Codeup info session at Geekdom on Thursday, Dec. 12.

XYN Management

Pronounced “Zen Management” and presented by COO Jay Miltor, XYN Management has created a cloud based application which helps hospital solid organ transplant programs keep up with their patient outcomes and predict what the outcome will be for future transplant procedures.
According to Miltor, all transplant centers in the United States get a report card twice a year which grades them on their transplant outcomes. This includes how many patients survived and how many kept a functional donated organ. If the hospital falls below standard, they must undergo a rigorous and expensive corrective action plan.
XYN Management has created a system that allows hospitals to keep up with their report cards in real time and predicts what future report cards will look like with statistical analysis. The system will also calculate the risk for a transplant based on a patient’s medical record.
The startup has been in business for a year and a half and has 15 current clients. Miltor says the company is profitable but is also looking for additional investments.
XYN Management is currently looking to hire a high level statistician (has a college degree in statistics) who can also code. Additionally, they need an interface designer, an Apex programmer, and a programmer.

Southwest Research Institute’s ROS industrial software

Southwest Research Institute Sr. Research Engineer Shaun Edwards presented the ROS industrial software – open source software for industrial robotics programming.
Edwards is working to create a community for the software and hopes someone will be able to create a breakthrough in the industrial robotics industry. A robotics programmer, Edwards is frustrated with the current state of industry technology which has been largely resistant to change and has been lagging behind other robotic applications with 10-year-old technology. Edwards hopes more users will build up the software base and ultimately be a resource for SWRI, opening the door for greater robotics possibilities in the industrial area.
“They build up the code base. People actually give software back to the ROS industrial program. Then we can leverage that,” Edwards said.
In a demonstration of the software, Edwards showed how it can identify visible objects such as a bag on the floor. He hopes that one day industrial robots will be able to look at and interact with objects intelligently.

Codeup Seeks to Create New Developers in San Antonio

October 24, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 8 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

“Learn to Program. Get a Job Offer. Guaranteed.”
This is the not-so-humble sales pitch of Codeup – a for-profit code education startup founded by San Antonio entrepreneur and angel investor Michael Girdley. The startup offers a nine week programming boot camp located at Geekdom of San Antonio which will teach the programming skills currently sought for in the workforce. The startup’s first boot camp, starting Feb. 3, will focus on web development and will cover Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and JavaScript. The camp price tag is $7,430, and if the student does not receive a job offer within six months of completing the course they get half their tuition back. Enrollment has already begun.
Girdley justifies his guarantee with his business approach. Before launch, he collaborated with both small startups and larger companies in need of developers to find out exactly what skill-set they want to hire.
“We went and talked to them and got feedback on what they are looking for. We added a whole set of methodologies in terms of how to work as a team of programmers to the course after meeting with certain employers,” Girdley said. “Ultimately we have two customers. One is the student and the other is the employers. We have really worked hard to have them meet in the middle for everyone to be happy.”
Codeup’s classroom experience is designed to be as intensive and hands-on as possible. Students will learn concepts quickly in 15 minute intervals and then immediately implement them with exercises lasting 20 minutes. Each class will hold 20 students. Girdley will be teaching the classes along with Jason Straughn, Samantha Atkins, and Chris Turner. During exercises, all four instructors will be present to answer any questions. Classes will be eight hours a day and five days week.
To ensure that graduating students get hired, Codeup has formed agreements with 18 startups and recruiting companies who have agreed to consider hiring the graduates upon completion of the course. A few of the employers Girdley has talked to – whom he can’t name at this time – have such difficulty finding developers that they are willing to hire immediately after graduation.
Despite its growing tech talent, finding full time developers in San Antonio is a difficult task — both for large companies like Labatt Food Service and smaller startups such as Geekdom’s TrueAbility. Founder and COO Frederick “Suizo” Mendler welcomes an easier way to find developer talent.
“For us, it is a constant challenge to find folks that can operate at a fairly high level when it comes to the dev stuff. If they produce a good candidate then, yea, we’ll take a look at them,” Mendler said. “All the other developers we hire, we have to go out and hunt them down, go find them in weird places.”
Codeup will start out with only one class of 20, and that class is already starting to fill up. Codeup has received seven applicants since they went public a week ago and have already confirmed two spots. Texas State University Communications Graduate Leslie Tolbert was the first to sign up. She developed a love of programming in her last semester of college but was having trouble learning it all on her own.
“I really feel it’s an investment to myself to make this bigger commitment. It’s really hard to teach yourself how to program through all the other resources out there,” Tolbert said. “It was really appealing to me to have the option that Codeup presents to work with a team of peers…in a collaborative space with expert instructors available to answer questions.”
Tolbert was also able to take advantage of one of the three women’s scholarships Codeup offers, which will pay for half of the tuition. Two are still available.
As a for-profit company, Codeup will raise revenue by charging tuition and by charging a placement fee to the employer when they hire a graduate. The employer’s fee will be equal to 10 percent of the graduates annual salary. Codeup currently has no competitors in San Antonio, but would be competing with MakerSquare in Austin. While the model is similar to Rackspace Hosting’s Open Cloud Academy, the two will not directly compete because they are teaching different skills. In another similarity to the Open Cloud Academy, Girdley says applicants do not need any prior coding experience to be admitted.
“If you are a smart person and you are willing to work hard, you don’t need to know anything. Show up, we will take care of you.” Girdley said.

Geekdom was a sponsor of Silicon Hills News. TrueAbility is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News.

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