The last cohort of 2020 has officially graduated, and what a year it has been!
The Class of December 2020 stands out for its spirit of community, collaboration, and paying it forward. We’re impressed to see the Alchemy community continue to be a place where students and alumni help one another in their growth. Transitioning to remote learning in 2020 has not changed our community value; it’s strengthened it.
This was a cohort of major career transitions. Entrepreneurship was a common background. One grad transitioned to software development after running a successful glass blowing business for two decades, another was the owner of the NE Portland establishment Gold Rush Coffee, another opened and operated a popular entertainment venue, and still another founded a successful tiny home construction company. A few had lived abroad teaching English in Japan and China; others ran a virtual business while traveling the globe. Others hailed from the music industry, worked in IT, and we even had a gaming-machinist-cheese connoisseur.
Clearly, this class encapsulates diverse experiences and backgrounds. Perhaps that’s why their ability to adapt and collaborate remotely stood out from the beginning.
We’re excited for you to meet these incredible software developers who just completed our program, going from little to no coding experience to completing innovative projects with Full Stack savvy.
This class harnessed the stack we teach: React, Redux, PostreSQL, NodeJS, and Express, and also integrated Python, tenserflow and Socket.io, to complete these great projects in a one week sprint, working remotely.
One exciting student project example is Canary, a learning platform that engages students through movement. Teachers on the platform can pose questions to the classroom and students can select their answers simply through their hand gestures on video, which are trained through a machine learning package.
These driven, experienced folks have one thing in common: they love to code and will bring depth and excellence to any team they join.
We look forward to seeing their new superpowers in action as software developers ready to create positive change in the tech industry, their future teams, and the world at large.