Photo by BONOMOTION_VIDEO
By Ariel Quiñones
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**In the past, computer science and coding were seen as uncreative and uninspiring; a niche area best left to the experts (and the geeks) but in the 21st century, this is no longer the case. Nothing demonstrated this better than Ironhack's recent Hackshow that graduated nearly 20 students from diverse backgrounds as Jr. Web Developers into Miami's tech community. Ironhack is a leading international coding bootcamp with campuses in Miami, Madrid and Barcelona.
More than 160 people including Ironhack’s hiring partners, leaders in the Miami tech community and the curious gathered on Thursday night at Building.co in Brickell to be wowed by the ideas from students who participated in Ironhack’s 23rd global cohort.
Once again, we saw firsthand how people across a spectrum of jobs - lawyers, professional athletes, artists - are shedding their past for a future in the booming tech industry. Ironhack students dedicated eight weeks completely immersed in learning how to code in Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. All of the hours and hard work pays off at the Hackshow, where they present their final project web applications to a panel of judges who selected a winner.
The student projects were built from scratch and included apps designed to solve real-life problems in various industries. These projects included - "Litigrade," "DocDoc Who's There," "Orthodox Chic," "MyFunTrip" and "STRIPPRS." The panel of judges was comprised of some of the leading CTOs in South Florida - Tobias Franoszek, CTO and Co-Founder of KIPU Systems, Brett Paden, CTO and Co-Founder of Glip, and Rich Kroll, Director of Engineering at Modernizing Medicine.
The evening also marked Ironhack’s one-year anniversary in Miami.
The Winner
After much deliberation from the judges, the winner was David James Knight, a licensed attorney and a member of the U.S. Military, who created an application called "Litigrade" that uses public court data to rate trial attorneys based on their wins and losses—not on peer reviews or other subjective criteria. “Before Ironhack, I was an attorney with a liberal arts background. I dabbled in front-end design (HTML, CSS, WordPress), but always thought that anything more technical than that was for Computer Science majors," says Knight. "Ironhack proved me wrong. In eight very intense weeks, I went from being an unhappy attorney to a legitimate developer and tech entrepreneur."
Code or Go Home
Coding skills and tech literacy in general aren't just useful in technology. They can be applied to all industries. What business today doesn't have a computer component? Learning to speak to computers through code forces people to think in different ways. Students learn to decompose problems in the systematic way that computers want them to. What's most interesting is that it turns out computers aren't all that smart - they only appear to be smart with a good set of instructions and some solid logic. Applying that way of thinking to other disciplines can have surprising results. Coding is truly one of the most exciting education opportunities of the twenty-first century, and Ironhack hopes to bring that to new groups of people.
Ironhack is accepting final applications for its next cohort beginning January 11, 2016. More information: Ironhack.com
Ariel Quiñones is Co-Founder of Ironhack.