um I went toe undergrad 1999 to 2003. And, um, when when I started studying computer science in 1999 I tell you, it was, like, quite naive about the industry and kind of where things were headed and software engineering and so forth. Um, I I went into college really thinking like I wanna make video games And if I if either make video games or make like, um, hardware like three D X video accelerators and so forth. And by the time I was wrapping up with college, I guess I had, I'll say, like, grown up a lot and was a little bit underwhelmed or frustrated with what seemed like a pretty narrow focus in our computer science community that there was a lot of emphasis on, like making things to make the most money as possible. And I felt like that just didn't really appeal to me. Eso I had. A lot of my friends and peers were going off to work at kind of your big defense contractors and aerospace companies and so forth. Um, which was totally reasonable. Um, and I decided to take some time and get into teaching. So I joined teach for America in 2003. Um, I taught middle school for a year and then high school for four years and then, um, helped open a middle school and new help, like start a new middle school, um, and run that for two years. So altogether. It was like seven years in in public education. Andi, I would say that that whole experience, like, really shaped Ah, lot of my understanding of the world and work and business And, like, even ethics and morals and so forth, I think, um, getting to spend time with people who we're not like, I think when I was in my computer science studies, my peers and friends were given most everything in life, like had the high level of kind of personal privilege. And when I got out toe work and teach, it was really eye opening to see what it is like toe live without so much privilege and toe, have toe fight and kind of grind for everything. Uh, everything that you get. And so I think that I've kind of kept going down that path while I left public education in in 2009. Um, just kind of kept working on these ideas of, like, how could you use education to help people like change whole trajectory and change what's possible for them? What's possible for their family, like all those, uh, kinds of impacts. And while I still enjoy, I sometimes joke with my students that I don't even like programming when I do it now. Sometimes like, okay, it's kind of fun, but the thing I'm most compelled by is how it can be a tool for people to change their whole life on. That's really like the inspiration behind starting touring, just kind of opening those doors wider to like a broad swath of people.

concept around accelerated developer training. So the first program I started was back in, um 20 12. Yeah, 2012. And had this question of if you had really smart people who don't know anything about programming, how long would it take to turn them into job ready software developers? And I obviously had done like, a for your computer science degree at Arizona State and I I learned a lot of things, but also there was a lot that just didn't make a big impact. Um, whether it was languages or courses or whatever that I felt like I didn't learn the skills that I really now value as necessary for professional software developer um things. I was just talking yesterday. It's one of my alumni and he was ranting about automated testing and how his company doesn't do automated testing and he doesn't understand. Like, why would people write software without automated tests? And I, you know, understood his frustration and also said, like, Hey, just so you know, like when I went to college, I never even knew that existed. It was not even a topic of discussion that one might use software to test software. I had never heard of that until several years after graduating from university. And I think universities have a difficult role or occupy a difficult niche, which is that the typical university program is trying to both build foundational understandings and work skills. And e think it's very difficult to do both at the same time. And so we said, like what if we design a program that was really oriented about really oriented around the work skills and focus what, like, what are the things we would have to teach for that and where possible? Let's deep, deeper dive into theoretical understandings, but really try and keep them as the understandings that are going to impact the actual work that you do. When I was an undergrad, I had toe take a sequence of classes in assembly and, like I learned interesting things. I suffered a lot of hours in the lab trying to write assembler programs and and have them work. And I would not say that in the 17 years since then that those the skills I developed an assembly have ever been relevant to the work that I've done. It's like maybe if I was, if I became a hardware engineer or something like it could have. But for me, it didn't. It was a waste of time. Uh, and so then designing our program and so forth the questions were like, How could we? How could we teach the things that people are going to actually use and then deep dive where we can? So, um, currently we started with Ah, it didn't actually even have a name at the beginning, was just called touring school. But like, the program of study didn't have a name. Um, it's now called Back End Engineering. And then in 2016, we started a front end engineering course. Eso both of those. They run a lot longer than what's become common in the like, kind of boot camp space over the years is typically around like 8, 10, 12 weeks. Um, we've e think a lot of classes, a lot of courses were designed with this question off. Like how little can you teach somebody for them? Thio be employable. Um, and I think when you ask that question, you can get an answer. That is like 8, 10, 12 weeks. Um, we had a slightly different question, which was how long? What is the period of time at which someone can learn faster on the job that they can learn with us? Like, what's the inflection point where learning out in the professional world is gonna be faster and more meaningful to them? On DWI theorized that that was around six months, Um, did some testing. So my first program was five months. Second program was six months, and third program, uh, is, as it stands today is 27 weeks. So it's just about seven months. Um, we've always done in person learning, and I continue to believe that in person, learning the best in person learning is better than the best online learning. But I would say the gap between those is getting is getting tighter as all of us or most everyone has been compelled into remote learning and remote work over the last nine months. 10 months? Um, I think we're all learning a lot about how to make this work s o for us. We've been running all our classes online during this time. We'll stay online until at least July of next year. Um, and basically what we're seeing is that student results are strong enough that there's no rush to go back in person. Um, that we can kind of afford to be like the last people to go back in person. And, um, yeah, it just kind of keep keep going on with this remote life. There is discussion about whether we should ever go back in person, like, should we just a remote? There are these interesting advantages, Like, um, you know, for us being in like a urban environment, most of our students commute to the office each day when we're in person. And if you just take the maybe 45 minutes that spent each way commuting an hour and a half a day, five days a week and multiply that out across 27 weeks like you could actual weeks of time back by not commuting or even if they're not productive during that time, when they're at home, they're cooking breakfast. They're doing their laundry there resting, sleeping, whatever. Um and so I think we have some hard questions to discuss and consider over the next, like, six months as faras Will we go back in person or not? Um, right now I'm 85. 90%. Yes, but but not 100%

thing, um, trying to figure out what to teach, because if you ask an employer, they always believe that whatever they use is the most important thing on DSO. Basically, every employer would, like Toa, have customized training classes that match up exactly what their demands. And so for us, it's always been a challenge and opportunity in a way to talk to employers. Ah, see what they think they want. Try and assemble that into courses that makes sense without being too scattered. Um, e think it's rarely useful to be familiar with the technology or to get exposed to a technology. It's good to know technologies air there. But beyond that, like if you take um, no Js. For instance, if a student's decides toe like study no Js for a week and then later is job hunting, they don't know enough. They don't have enough skill developed where it actually impacts their job hunt. And they've almost done too much work to just know that no Js exists. So I think there's like a sweet spot in there where it's valuable to go do a four hour workshop or a two day hackathon or something like that and learn about a technology that might not be your in your normal course of study. But then, beyond that, if you're going to study it, I think you have to study it for Riel. And it has to be like multiple weeks from a month, six weeks kind of thing where you've built multiple projects and so forth. And so it's always hard to try and balance that from a course design standpoint. Which language or languages do we teach? Which frameworks do we use on top of those languages? Um, the best information comes from the alumni who are actually working in the company's. They know better than the companies know about what you actually need to be successful at the company. And they're the ones who can tell us like, Well, you know, in my company were doing typescript and in the front end program maturing. We just we learned vanilla JavaScript, and this is what was hard for me about that transition. And then we can use that information to either make changes to the courses or to add, like supplementary sessions and materials to say like, Okay, you learn this thing now in vanilla JavaScript If you want, apply it in typescript. Do it like this. Um, it's been hugely validating to see students work in fields and technologies that we didn't teach them. So e think it's particularly true amongst our back end program that students while they learn ruby as kind of their object oriented home base in the boat back in program. Many of them will also learn python along the way or pick up Java and then go into jobs where it's not the majority of them. I would say, Well, the majority still go into, like ruby and rails centric jobs. 60 70 75% of them. Um, but the remaining percentage spread out across Elixir and Java and python. Um, a little dot net here and there. And what that shows me is that they really learned how to be software developers, not just how toe they didn't just memorize one programming language and then, like, regurgitated that they can reapply those ideas. And that to me says that we've struck the right balance between coming back to the question that I think universities struggle with or face around balancing like work skills with fundamental understanding. If you have enough fundamental understanding that you can reapply your skills in a new language and Freemark then I think you've actually develop something meaningful that can keep you going for your career.