| My name is Mike McGee and I am one of the co-founders of Code Academy here in Chicago. "I've never taken a single programming class and am not techy-- my background is in math and economics." No problem at all. We are a "beginner-focused" program, because that's where we were last year when we started to learn how to program. We have one of the best Ruby on Rails instructors in the world (http://codeacademy.org/staff), and his passion is to teach beginners how to build applications in RoR. "I'm an undergrad and interested in startups as a way of life" Our program has an entrepreneurial bent, so if you want to learn about startups, this is one of the best places to be. In our current program we have CEOs of startups and people who want to work for startups. We also have people who want jobs in companies and people who want to become professional software developers. We have connections with most of the major entrepreneurs and VCs in the Chicago community (http://codeacademy.org/community). The diversity is amazing and something that you can only learn from. "Ultimately I don't hope to do the bulk of the technical work for this idea but I definitely need to know what's going on with the coders I will work with, so I need some technical background if I'm to pursue this idea" We have students with this same exact goal at Code Academy. They know becoming a software developer is not in their future, but they want to understand the software development process and be able to communicate in as much technical detail as possible to work with their developers. If you would like to talk with some of our students let me know. Also, you can only take one program at a time. I graduated from Northwestern, so I understand the urge to want to pile on and see if I can take both classes, but this class is pretty intense, especially for people who are new to programming. One program will be more than enough for you to handle for 12 weeks. If you have anymore questions, please contact me at mike at codeacademy dot org |