It’s been an amazing two years since Anyone Can Learn To Code was founded, right here at 1871. Since then, we’ve graduated dozens of new developers over five cohorts in Chicago, and even expanded to San Francisco in late 2015. This year holds even more great things in store, which we can’t wait to announce over the coming weeks. At our two-year anniversary, we want to take a look back at what we and our developer graduates have accomplished.
In May of 2014, we began our inaugural cohort with seven student developers and one team member - Founder and CEO Jay Wengrow - right here at 1871. Today we have three lead instructors running three overlapping cohorts in two cities, and one member of that first cohort has since become a member of our team. How things have changed!
From the beginning, 1871 has been a huge part of our growth and success. The community here has been an essential support system for our team: we’ve gotten such amazing mentorship, networking, advice, friendship, and all the invaluable resources provided to startups just like us. 1871 has become so important to our graduates, too - they spend their evenings and Sundays here in class, and at the conclusion of our program, they get to show off their new skills and achievements to the community here on Showcase day.
Our latest Chicago Showcase Lunch Hour took place a few weeks ago in the 1871 Auditorium, where 14 new developers graduated under Lead Instructor Peter Jang. At the event, graduates showed off their Capstone projects to friends, family, potential employers, and the 1871 community. The developers built their individual web apps using technologies such as Ruby on Rails on the backend and JavaScript and Angular on the frontend, along with a variety of libraries and APIs for features such as map integration, text messaging, browser extensions, and music streaming.
Thanks to all the 1871 members and friends who came out to support our graduates! If you missed out on the latest Showcase, you can catch a quick recap of each Capstone project below.
Holmes
Created by Zach Simon
Holmes is a real estate web app that helps prospective home buyers or renters keep track of and compare all the properties they are considering based on the attributes they consider most important. It includes a user-customized dashboard and leverages data from Zillow and Walk Score.
It’s On!
Created by Sean McNally
It’s On! is a social web app designed to let users know which live sporting events are being shown on TV at various bars. It includes a check-in feature where users can submit their own information on what’s playing where.
Lecturegrab
Created by Michael Vanderwood
Lecturegrab is a continuing education web app that delivers brief lectures to the user via text, email, or the app itself, focusing on convenience and customization. It also tracks users’ stats and enables discussions amongst users.
MyStream
Created by Al Ilseman
Mystream is a web app for music streaming and organization that reads file meta-data to create relevant database structures at the time of upload. Users can browse their libraries, add songs to active playlists, and upload music while enjoying uninterrupted streaming.
Ooh, Gimme
Created by Dennise Saxton
Ooh, Gimme is a wishlist web app that provides users with a robust search feature to find products, add them to wishlists, and publicly share their lists.
Patient Pulse
Created by Chloe Canon
Patient Pulse is a portal for long-term hospital patients to interact with the hospital social environment and patient services. It lets patients search and sign up for events or appointments, manage social calendars, and communicate with service providers and hospital staff.
Quoteboard
Created by Dawn Vana
Quoteboard is a social media web app and database that provides users a way to search, share, manage, and save the types of sayings that people share with each other every day.
Real Session
Created by Alex Ispa-Cowan
Real Session is a platform for musicians that allows users to store their repertoires, create jam sessions with other users, and compile lists of common songs by comparing repertoires. Features include sorting lists by style or composer and randomly selecting a common tune.
ServiceWeb
Created by Jamie Gates
ServiceWeb is a web app for social workers and community activists that lets users share, look up, and review the services they use on a daily basis to help people in need without exchanging money or personal information.
Studere
Created by Idriys Lowe
Studere is a web app that facilitates individual study by enabling users to break subjects down into environments, each one a place to gather related links, notes, images, due dates, and reminders. It lets users share and comment on each other’s work to build a community around the passion of learning.
TeeBox
Created by Ryan Lennon
TeeBox is a golf application that helps users find courses nearby, find available tee times, and make reservations to play. It leverages Google Maps and weather APIs.
Trivia Time
Created by Gregory Bilodeau
Trivia Time is a trivia quiz web app that lets users answer various categorized trivia questions, compare to previous scores, mark their favorite quizzes, and search for new ones. It leverages a public API containing tens of thousands of trivia questions.
Ultimate Central: Chicago
Created by Jennifer Wu
Ultimate Central is the place for the Chicago ultimate-frisbee community to go for information about events, track & field conditions, and join the next upcoming game. It leverages the Google Maps API.
Yoga Loca
Created by Nina Leung
Yoga Loca is a web app that allows users to search for yoga classes based on time and location, save classes to a calendar, browse and review studios, and get directions to classes near them. It leverages the Google Maps API.
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Anyone Can Learn To Code (anyonecanlearntocode.com) is an intensive web-development training program and apprenticeship, which boasts a 15-week part-time schedule (evenings and Sundays) so that students can keep their jobs while they transform their careers. At the conclusion of the course, our graduates are guaranteed an apprenticeship to leverage and continue to grow their new skills under the supervision of experienced web developers.
