My Experience Building at Startup Institute Boston

By Mohamed Ali

Before enrolling in Startup Institute Boston, my programming experience was limited to two computer science classes in an academic setting. I came to SIB expecting  to take lots of notes and listen to hours of lectures just like I did in college.

This wasn’t the case however. At SIB the focus was on building, We were building first, failing often, and then figuring out why we failed last. Instructors didn’t expect us to understand what and how we were building. They only expected us to always be coding.

I took this expectation seriously and started working on my first web application in the 3rd week of class. By the 4th week I had a functional application. In total I spent 25 hrs before I deployed a functional application to Heroku.

Startup Institute accelerated my learning process. There are still some gaps to fill before I can add value to a development team but I’ve learned more than I have in a year of academic classes. I recommend this experience to anyone interested in a career as a developer.

Check out my first project, RainSMS