GarageScript Information

We are a nonprofit public benefit organization dedicated to helping and training people who are pursuing a career as a software engineer. What does that mean? We help low income earners who are struggling financially and looking for a job. We teach them how to code and work with local government agencies to help them financially so they can focus on learning. Learning how to code will be their full time job! What is the curriculum like? First, students learn the foundation track. This covers JavaScript functions, arrays, objects, and classes. Next, they learn nodejs by building projects starting with server specific tasks such as processing and manipulating files and images all the way to server-client interfaces like express, apis, etc. Once a strong foundation is built, our students would get work experience by contributing to our core codebase. We are building several internal products that students use on a daily basis (think gmail, dropbox, firebase, slack etc). Project teams function like any high-quality engineering team with weekly sprints and extensive code reviews. How long does it take? To create a non-competitive learning environment and prevent students from comparing themselves with each other, we encourage students learn at their own pace. Each lesson in our curriculum comes with dozens of practice problems and students progress to the next lesson after completing all the challenges and having each challenge code reviewed and approved. Students move at their learning pace and ‘graduate’ when they have contributed 5 comprehensive features to our codebase. How do you ensure quality and scale? When a student completes a lesson, they are required to teach that lesson to incoming students. To create a positive and personalized learning environment, each teacher will teach at most 2 students at a time to encourage in-depth discussions for each lesson. How is your curriculum different? We believe in training students with the intention of hiring back every single one of them if we can. This means that we follow every industry best-practices. For example, students are code reviewed from the first line of code they write by a more experienced student to promote a healthy mindset where students feel comfortable getting critiqued and giving constructive feedback.
We value communication and teamwork over individual accomplishments so students grow their skills by contributing to team projects after completing the basic lessons. What do you do with donation money? The more money with raise, the more people we can support! Our mission is to help people struggling financially by not only teaching them how to code, but also help them financially as they learn. Where can we find you? We volunteer as a team every Saturday at our local libraries to teach the community how to code and to help self learners with questions. Find our events on our Facebook Page! Fun Facts? All our students code in vim. We do not teach for loops and while loops. (Recursion is the only loop we use)