I recently attended two web development workshop “meet and greet” sessions where recent graduates presented their projects and chatted with potential employers. I’m honestly surprised by how polished the projects were. Sure there were a few simple ones but most were solid; they were good ideas, well designed, and had functional backends. It’s amazing what it’s possible to do in 12 weeks.

These programs focus on a single frontend framework, such as Backbone or Angular, and a backend framework, usually Ruby on Rails. With the number of plugins and public APIs available it’s easier to get an app up and running than ever before. Of course these programs won’t provide the same level of knowledge as a degree or years of experience will but for many projects that’s not important. Being able to get something functional and private is more important than perfect and private and these bootcamps provide enough skills to do that. More importantly, they make code accessible to an entirely new group of people and provide enough skills to allow them to continue learning on their own.

It does make you think where tech skills are headed. As it becomes easier to build a larger variety of apps it will be interesting to see where software engineering will end up. Software engineering is a young industry and I suspect it’ll become increasingly specialized as the base set of tools and knowledge become widespread.