Coding for all

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Learn to code in 12 weeks. Start the path toward a better career by learning new, high-demand skills in a welcoming, inclusive environment.

No upfront tuition, fees based on an income share agreement.

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Why Academy?

At Academy, learn the skills you need to teach yourself to code. Work collaboratively with like-minded individuals and top-tier instructors. ISA options allow students to pursue instruction with no upfront tuition costs in a diverse classroom setting.

Coding for all

Half of the seats in each class are reserved for people underrepresented in tech.

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Instructor pointing to code on student's laptop.

No upfront tuition cost

Academy's Income Share Agreement (ISA) funding options mean no tuition fees until after you start your new career.

Learn & Connect

Learn to code Ruby, C#, JavaScript, HTML/CSS and more through project-based learning and gain connections to the larger tech community in Pittsburgh.

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Meet our Instructors

Together, John and Jean Lange have over 30 years of coding and development experience. Since 2016, they have worked intimately with hundreds of students, teaching them how to become coders as well as how to pursue and manage a career in coding. When they're not teaching, they enjoy gaming, puzzles, and other pursuits.

Instructors sitting on couch, looking dubiously thoughtful.

Meet our Instructors

Together, John and Jean Lange have over 30 years of coding and development experience. Since 2016, they have worked intimately with hundreds of students, teaching them how to become coders as well as how to pursue and manage a career in coding. When they're not teaching, they enjoy gaming, puzzles, and other pursuits.

Academy Grads Succeed

Academy graduates have a job placement rate over 80%, with an average starting salary over $55,000. Other graduates have gone on to take higher-paying positions at their current company thanks to their new, in-demand skillset.

80%

Job Placement Rate

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Impact & Community

Each session of Academy ends with a service project to benefit a local nonprofit. We are committed to working with the nonprofit community and using our powers to improve peoples' lives. We also value diversity and ensure that our classroom is a safe, welcoming environment for anybody looking to code.

Hire a developer

Academy graduates are in high demand. After 12 weeks of instruction in major systems and coding languages, our grads have the talent to tackle any front end, back end, full stack or UX/UI problems your organization might face.
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Upcoming Sessions

We run multiple sessions of our developer bootcamp annually. Find out when the next class begins.

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Our Program
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Income Share Agreements

Academy offers ISAs that allow students to pay no upfront tuition costs in exchange for a portion of income after beginning a new career upon graduation. Academy Pittsburgh’s ISA program comes with key downside risk protections, like a minimum income threshold equivalent to a $45,000 salary, and a maximum time window that ends the obligation even if less than the initial funding amount was paid.
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Apprenti Pittsburgh

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In partnership with Apprenti PGH, Fortyx80, and the Pittsburgh Tech Council, we are proud to connect eligible program grads with training opportunities for high demand tech apprenticeship roles. Visit the Apprenti PGH site for upcoming apprenticeship open application dates, funding opportunities, and general infosessions.
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Featured Projects

Here are just some of the projects Academy students have completed over the years. Each project uses different technologies, but all of them are for a real client, and teach students about delivering software products.

Pop'n'Lock

Skills Developed:

  • Hardware/electronics
  • Soldering
  • RasPi
  • Linux systems
  • Node.js
  • JS
  • MVC
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • API design
  • Authentication
  • React Native
  • App design

Pop'n'Lock is a system that allows authenticated users to unlock doors with their phone.

It comes in three parts: an electronic door latch that can be unlocked by code running on a Raspberry Pi, a secure server for administrating users/doors, and a phone app that, when the user authenticates, sends an unlock request that the Pi picks up and acts on to unlock the door.

Developing this app gave the class great practice in working with electronics (Thomas did some scary things with electricity) and burning out relays, as well as in dealing with some very real-life situations - what happens when the power goes out?

Pop'n'Lock is installed and running at two local businesses in Pittsburgh that need to give access to a varied and changing group of people - a situation in which fobs don't work well, but adding or removing access by email address works great.

Academy Pittsburgh also has a demo box on site to show people how the hardware part works - ask for a demo anytime!

Pop'n'Lock is a system that allows authenticated users to unlock doors with their phone.

It comes in three parts: an electronic door latch that can be unlocked by code running on a Raspberry Pi, a secure server for administrating users/doors, and a phone app that, when the user authenticates, sends an unlock request that the Pi picks up and acts on to unlock the door.

Developing this app gave the class great practice in working with electronics (Thomas did some scary things with electricity) and burning out relays, as well as in dealing with some very real-life situations - what happens when the power goes out?

Pop'n'Lock is installed and running at two local businesses in Pittsburgh that need to give access to a varied and changing group of people - a situation in which fobs don't work well, but adding or removing access by email address works great.

Academy Pittsburgh also has a demo box on site to show people how the hardware part works - ask for a demo anytime!

Conference Companion App

Skills Developed:

  • React Native
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS
  • MVC
  • MongoDB
  • App design
  • Push notifications
  • Connecting to outside APIs
  • Chrome bits

In session 2, ReplayFX ("the greatest arcade in the universe!") worked with Academy to create an app to help attendees find out what was happening at the conference. Attendees could download the app to their phone to see scheduled events (like performances, contests, and lectures), a list of vendors, an event map, and the locations of each of several hundred arcade and pinball machines.

The session also created an admin website for entering the data and another app showing schedule data designed to run on Chromebits connected to TVs throughout the venue.

This project was a smash hit - ReplayFX saw thousands of downloads and engaged two other sessions of Academy Pittsburgh (3 & 5) to continue improving it. Other conferences have also used the same app - it was also extremely popular among attendees at the Millvale Music Festival, which had 30+ venues spread out over several miles of Millvale with more than 100 acts that people crowded in to see.

In session 2, ReplayFX ("the greatest arcade in the universe!") worked with Academy to create an app to help attendees find out what was happening at the conference. Attendees could download the app to their phone to see scheduled events (like performances, contests, and lectures), a list of vendors, an event map, and the locations of each of several hundred arcade and pinball machines.

The session also created an admin website for entering the data and another app showing schedule data designed to run on Chromebits connected to TVs throughout the venue.

This project was a smash hit - ReplayFX saw thousands of downloads and engaged two other sessions of Academy Pittsburgh (3 & 5) to continue improving it. Other conferences have also used the same app - it was also extremely popular among attendees at the Millvale Music Festival, which had 30+ venues spread out over several miles of Millvale with more than 100 acts that people crowded in to see.

Pediatric Palliative Care Caregiver App

Skills Developed:

  • MVC
  • React
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS

The Pediatric Palliative Care Alliance worked with session 3 to produce a proof of concept for an app that they wanted to build for caregivers to manage and update their child's medical information. In the two week project period, session 3 students built a React app that allowed users to securely enter information about their children, doctors, insurance, medications, appointments, and more.

PPCA then took this proof of concept to funders - and secured funding to build it out further. They hired a local company to keep working on it, and that company proceeded to hire 2 Academy Pgh grads from that session onto their team for the app.

Today, the Caregiver App is a full-fledged, in-use product, available online and for your phone.

The Pediatric Palliative Care Alliance worked with session 3 to produce a proof of concept for an app that they wanted to build for caregivers to manage and update their child's medical information. In the two week project period, session 3 students built a React app that allowed users to securely enter information about their children, doctors, insurance, medications, appointments, and more.

PPCA then took this proof of concept to funders - and secured funding to build it out further. They hired a local company to keep working on it, and that company proceeded to hire 2 Academy Pgh grads from that session onto their team for the app.

Today, the Caregiver App is a full-fledged, in-use product, available online and for your phone.

Unreal Tournament Data Visualization

Skills Developed:

  • Get & parse log files
  • CosmosDB (cloud DB)
  • D3
  • Node.js
  • Data visualization design
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS

Data visualization is a much-needed skill - taking inhuman numbers of boring entries and finding useful and interesting information in them to expose trends, outliers, and patterns. This kind of task applies to many domains - seeing which pages are useful or confusing to visitors on your website, understanding which products are bought with which other ones, detecting oddities in credit card usage. And no matter which overwhelming amount of data you're working with, the skills of parsing it, deciding which visualizations to show, and then feeding data into those visualizations are the same.

In session 8, students put those skills into practice in the service of understanding and attracting interest to what was happening during a video game. At the ReplayFX conference, attendees could play Unreal Tournament - and then see statistics about what had happened during their game and across all the games so far. Which weapon was the most successful? Which one killed its own wielder the most? Which minute of the game was the deadliest? Who holds the record for the most deaths so far?

Some challenges that came up during this project:

  • The usual Academy Pgh project weeks' challenge of learning new frameworks and putting them into use
  • Parsing and ingesting the data fast enough to show matches right after they'd finished
  • Designing a communicative dashboard of data

The students diligently enjoyed the task of producing test data to work with by playing rounds of UT versus each other - the rest of the class helped out, too.

Data visualization is a much-needed skill - taking inhuman numbers of boring entries and finding useful and interesting information in them to expose trends, outliers, and patterns. This kind of task applies to many domains - seeing which pages are useful or confusing to visitors on your website, understanding which products are bought with which other ones, detecting oddities in credit card usage. And no matter which overwhelming amount of data you're working with, the skills of parsing it, deciding which visualizations to show, and then feeding data into those visualizations are the same.

In session 8, students put those skills into practice in the service of understanding and attracting interest to what was happening during a video game. At the ReplayFX conference, attendees could play Unreal Tournament - and then see statistics about what had happened during their game and across all the games so far. Which weapon was the most successful? Which one killed its own wielder the most? Which minute of the game was the deadliest? Who holds the record for the most deaths so far?

Some challenges that came up during this project:

  • The usual Academy Pgh project weeks' challenge of learning new frameworks and putting them into use
  • Parsing and ingesting the data fast enough to show matches right after they'd finished
  • Designing a communicative dashboard of data

The students diligently enjoyed the task of producing test data to work with by playing rounds of UT versus each other - the rest of the class helped out, too.

Apply for Academy

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Ready to take the next step? Start by filling out an application. We accept students for upcoming sessions on a rolling basis. Apply today!

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