Re: Wondering About Flatiron School

Hi Everyone,

So I'm Avi, the founder and main instructor at the Flatiron School. I
guess I just want to address why I started the school and give you a
sense of what our program is about.

Our program is geared to people with no technical experience and our
goal is first and foremost to help them fall madly in love with code.
Once someone loves this, I know they'll never give up on learning it and
will value being great at their craft. Being a programmer, we take so
much for granted when we think of beginners. One of the first
assumptions we make is that a layman will connect in the same deep way
we have to code. It's important to show them what we take for granted.
That programmers change the world more on a daily basis then any other
profession. That technology now influences every aspect of our lives,
culture, economics, and politics. Just look at the US elections and how
better software helped Obama rally a vote where Romney's platform is
largely cited as having failed. That as a programmer we have the wealth
of human wisdom at our finger tips, able to bend it to our whim like
branches in the wind. That code presents a larger design pattern behind
all systems of massive complexity, of composition of synthesis, of
building up a system from smaller units of itself, like notes in a song
and atoms in a compound. So ya, that's Flatiron's first job, to help
people connect to the wonder of code.

Second, the mechanics and syntax of code are the easy parts. In fact, we
don't even teach that stuff, we expect you to learn it on your own
through our prework curriculum (which is open sourced
http://prework.flatironschool.com ). What we focus on isn't the science
of programming but the art of expression. Knowing how to define a method
isn't as important as understanding when methods are needed, what they
really mean, how they represent behavior. Programming is about
articulating an idea clearly, not to a machine, but to ourselves. I try
to show them how to break problems down, how to use the vocabulary they
have learnt to solve a problem, how to work in teams, how to come up
with effective plans, how to actually build. There is just so much more
to programming then the gestures of a particular language. We try to
teach all those other things.

Third, it's about seeing this as a career. We do our best to provide you
with the best leg up on a fruitful and long career as a developer. This
is not a program for people with great ideas that would make a billion
dollars if they could just learn to code. This is a program for people
wanting to spend the rest of their lives writing. We help find you jobs
that will continue to mentor you, teach you how to promote yourself by
writing blogs on technology and code, by presenting at meetups and
conferences, by contributing to open source, and by actually shipping
software.

Okay, this rant has gotten super long. But anyway, I hope that answers
some questions about our program and what we value. If it isn't for you,
that's fine. If you would never hire one of our students, that's fine
too. We aren't doing this for you. We are doing it because it makes us
happy.

Avi Flombaum

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