Yipit teaches every employee to code
Vin Vacanti, CEO of Yipit, just published a blog post in which he details how and why every Yipit employee is learning to code. He argues that even non-developers at tech companies are more productive if they can prototype or at least speak the language of tech. He describes their actual process for teaching employees: they mix content, projects, and mentorship to get employees to the right level as efficiently as possible.
I’m excited to see Yipit adopt a model of education that mirrors our’s. Working with our first 25 students, I’ve seen the compounding effect when you combine high-quality content, project-based learning, mentorship, and (the one piece he doesn’t mention explicitly) an environment conducive to sticking to one’s goals. We’re similarly putting our first marketing hire through our own front-end development course. I expect we’ll be hearing positive results from Vin in a few months, if not sooner.
From his post:
“Along the way, we’ve built a curriculum. Each person gets paired with a more experienced developer and goes through the program:
- We kick it off with a talk on the major components of the web stack largely based on the 6 things you need to learn to build your own prototype
- We spend two weeks learning the basics of python via the excellent Learning Python the Hard Way
- We then get a very basic understating of our web framework, Django, by working through the Django Tutorial
- Everyone spends a day coming up with a super basic idea for a fun web app that they might use with their friends or family
- We then spend the next two weeks getting practice building a web app by working through more Django tutorials including a todo, blog and calendar apps
- Once done, they’ll spend two weeks building their own simple web app based on what they’ve learned
- From there, we’ll spend some time learning the basics of systems work by getting their app deployed on Heroku, they can dive more into HTML/CSS and strengthen their knowledge of programming via Udacity’s course
The goal isn’t for everyone to become full developers but rather for everyone to learn the language of tech startups, to make better decisions, to become more self-sufficient, to truly become entrepreneurs within Yipit.”