Coding House
Description
Coding House was a fully immersive, live-in coding bootcamp. Students lived at our facilities for the duration of the 14-week program where cooking, cleaning, and transportation were all included. This allowed students to focus on coding without distractions.
A key differentiator for Coding House was our tuition model: instead of paying for our program upfront, we collected a percentage of the student's salary after they graduated and became gainfully employed.
Technological Direction
As CTO, I was first and foremost responsible for the technological direction of the company. This included:
- Proposing budgets for programs and projects
- Purchasing and upgrading equipment and software
- Supervising software developers
- Presiding over all IT and software-related projects
- Planning, directing, and coordinating operations to support company growth
- Formulating policies and strategic plans for future growth
- Managing daily operations of personnel, purchasing, administration, and information technology
- System Administration (email addresses, Google Apps, accounts, permissions, domain configuration, etc)
Development
Perhaps my most important responsibility was creating and maintaining our website and all internal software tools:
- Full-stack development of website using the MEAN stack
- UX/UI design
- Creation and maintenance of RESTful API with single sign-on (SSO) design to allow for integration of several internal tools
- Schema design and maintenance of MongoDB (replica set cluster to ensure redundancy and high availability)
- Testing using Mocha/Chai, continuous integration with TravisCI
- Configuration and deployment of development, testing, and production environments
- Verbose, well organized, and up-to-date API documentation
- Creation and maintenance of single page, interactive website
- Creation and maintenance of Angular application
- SEO
- Converstion optimization, including A/B testing with Optimizely
- Analytics (implementation analysis)
Notable Features
The Coding House system was a very verbose suite of applications designed to automate as many tasks as possible in order to maximize efficiency of staff, students, potential students, and potential employers.
The ultimate goal of this system was automate a student's progress from the moment they arrive at our website to the time they get a job.
- Automated email drips based on user activity
- In-browser IDE for students to complete code challenges. This allows for execution of code inside the browser, submission, review by staff, commenting, and grading.
- Payment gateway (using Braintree for credit cards and Forte for automatic ACH transfers)
- Automatic population, sending, tracking, and completion of contracts using HelloSign
- Automatic population, sending, tracking, and completiong of background checks using GoodHire
- QuickBooks integration to track and process all payments
- Interview scheduling using ScheduleOnce
- File upload/storage using AWS S3
- Slack notifications
- Portfolio submission and reviews
- Tracking and analysis of student information, progress, coursework, employment, and payments