WisBusiness: The Podcast with Paul Jirovetz and Michael Terrill for DevCodeCamp

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Paul Jirovetz and Michael Terrill for DevCodeCamp, a program teaching people software development skills.

Terrill is the director of instruction for the program, and says individual class sizes vary from just a handful of people to larger groups.

“With the larger classes, you can get nice group projects going as well,” Terrill said. “You get that individual experience, but you also get that collaboration experience… When you go on a job, you’re not going to be working by yourself. You’re going to be working on a team of people.”

Jirovetz (pictured here) is vice president of operations for DevCodeCamp. He says employers keep coming back to hire more of the students, as they’re more industry-ready than some coming out of universities with computer science degrees.

“At the end of the day, we’re forcing them to think and problem-solve. We’re forcing them to be okay with making some mistakes and getting out of their comfort zone,” Jirovetz said. “They quickly realize, ‘I can do this stuff.’”

One standout project was created by a student named Kao Xiong in just 10 days.

“He was a big fisherman; he decided he was going to create an app that would allow him to keep track of all his data,” Jirovetz said.

He created an app that could take a photo of a fish, identify it, capture its size, location, local weather conditions and even water currents. The application would then plot all that information onto a map.

“If you give something like that to the DNR, all of a sudden we have all this information,” Jirovetz said. “What is the best time, the best current, the best weather conditions to catch perch — well, Kao created something that can do that.”

Listen to the podcast, sponsored by UW-Madison: