Galvanize Acquisition, Regulatory Action, SQL, SEO, and Learning to Program in 10 Years
Jan 31 2020
News this week
Big news week for bootcamps.
Galvanize was acquired for $165m by K12, an online public school provider. This follows just a year and a half after Galvanize acquired Hack Reactor. This continues a trend of consolidation and acquisition in bootcamps, viz Bridgeport’s acquisition of Fullstack, 2U buys Trilogy, Chegg’s acquisition of Thinkful, and a host of other acquisitions summed up in Course Report on bootcamp acquisitions as of April 2018.
California Regulators announced an action against Holberton School covered in the Daily Beast. This follows similar August 2019 news of the same regulator (California’s BPPE) fining Lambda School.
The Galvanize acquisition seems like an okay exit for them - according to Crunchbase they had raised $167m (though I’m a little confused, since Crunchbase has the series C as both $32m and $43.4m - the total might actually be closer to $120m). The investors in their latest round probably didn’t have an awesome return, but might have made their investment back. Didn’t lose a bunch, but didn’t have an exit like Trilogy or General Assembly where investors were seeing a big multiple on their returns.
The Holberton news is more concerning. There’s a history of BPPE disciplinary actions against bootcamps. It’s not clear from the outside what the school’s communications with the BPPE have looked like. From the website, Holbertion appears to be continuing to operate normally - the text of the order says they have until Feb 4 to cease their operations. Have they submitted the paperwork and haven’t heard back? The BPPE website says that it’s currently working on applications received in September and October of 2019 - does that mean the school needs to wait until those are processed before they are legally allowed to keep teaching?
BPPE has been relatively positive towards ISAs in past meeting notes. The Lambda and Holberton actions seem to signal either that the schools have been sloppy with their paperwork, or that the Bureau is targeting bootcamps and ISAs. Holberton is one of the longer and more expensive bootcamps - $85k is the max ISA payback. There are a lot of bootcamps running in CA, either online or in-person. It could be that these two are the (current) exceptions to the rule, or that BPPE hasn’t gotten around to other online or CA providers yet.
If you’re just catching up on bootcamp industry news, Course Report’s year end summary is awesome (as is their January in review, though it leaves out the Holberton news from this week.)
Links
Become a SELECT Star is Julia Evans’ new zine to teach SQL ins and outs. It comes with a SQL playground. It’s really good, and I attribute a lot of it to Julia’s willingness to develop it in the open. She tweets drafts all the time, gets feedback from people as she goes, and ends up with a better product and a bigger audience. If you write curriculum, definitely check out her notes on [What makes a programming exercise good?]((https://jvns.ca/blog/2019/11/20/what-makes-a-programming-exercise-good/) which reflects on some of the development of her sql exercises.
What every programmer should know about SEO - SEO is a little intimidating, first because it’s mysterious, and second because it feels like everyone who talks about it online is scamming you somehow. This article doesn’t feel scammy, and helps demystify what SEO actually is. I also like Google’s SEO Starter Guide for similar reasons - they’re trying to debunk myths and reduce the noise on a subject that feels vaguely important.
Teach yourself to program in Ten Years, a classic from Peter Norvig. It’s a helpful reframing of what the learning journey might look like, and a perspective to keep in mind. Learning isn’t something that stops after you finish a course, graduate from a program, or land a job - it keeps going! The post also has the first appearance of one of my favorite charts on latency numbers. There’s an updated, interactive version of the chart and an awesome quiz version with code samples from above-mentioned Julia Evans.
Newsletter, website, slack group launches, and counting the people learning to code
Lots of launches happening this week!
This newsletter! The one you’re reading now!
A website (cs-ed.com - don’t look now, it’s a 404 page🤷♂️)
A Slack community for folks who teach programming
If you’re interested in joining, let me know!
Also - I’m writing up a set of estimates on the number of people learning to code, at different stages of their learning journey. If you’ve got ideas on how to count that, or ways you’d like to see that information presented, let me know.
That’s it for this week, have a great weekend!