Hackbright Academy is looking to change the male dominated programming world with their “10 week training program designed to help women become awesome programmers.” The initiative is very young and graduated its second batch of 16 people and the results of their education are not yet clear. However, co-founder David J. Phillips, who also co-founded startup Banjo, claimed that eight out of 12 students from Hackbright’s inaugural class were looking for jobs right away and they all ended up being offered jobs from well known firms.
Hackbright Academy other co-founders Christian Fernandez and Charles Ruhland are experienced developers that have been developing since they were young. Unlike them, Phillips got his coding skills from a class taught by Fernandez. Hackbright is basically the same program but only for women.
Classes currently take place in San Francisco’s Mission District where the participants are first taught the basics of web development. The course focuses Python, Flask, Django, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and then gives each student a personal project to complete.
Some may argue that the 3 month course may be too short to create a seasoned programmer but the Hackbrights approach seems to be working. In most cases the participants have already started their learning process and are interested in the work so teaching them is not like starting with someone who has zero experience.
Phillips is looking to expand his academy and get more students for the next batches. Hackbright tries to maintain an eight-to-one student-to-teacher ratio and will need to recruit a lot of instructors in case the classes grow. Phillips will continue to teach women how to program and may even add classe in other locations. He says, “I think going into it we didn’t realize how powerful it would be to do something like this. Right now, with the very small number of women in tech, if we can increase the ratio, that’s better for companies, better for productivity, better Silicon Valley, better for consumers. … There are people who hear about us who start considering software engineering as a career, when they never did before.”
Source: Tech Crunch
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