Learning Mobile Dev, Web Design in Bay Area
According to Peter Delevett in “Silicon Valley Finds Its Heart In San Francisco” (linked below), startups are swamping the city's South of Market region. He notes that there are 4,000 startups in the area and that units in one new Mission District condominium project went for a record $900 per square foot. You can bet many have a strong tech component. With all that concentrated activity in the south end of San Francisco, where do people go to learn to be exceptionally good at mobile development or Web design? As it turns out, a few area organizations cater to this emerging market. Marakana This San Francisco-based company offers specialized training on Android, Big Data, Javascript, Mobile, and Ruby. Courses usually run from one to four days and are held in both San Francisco and New York. They have a fairly active community forum and offer a large number of educational videos in the “Stream” area on their site. Noisebridge Located on Mission Street, this organization is all about do-it-yourself and hacking. While they offer classes on programming Arduinos and soldering, they also have recurring classes on front-end Web development, Ruby on Rails, intro to SQL databases, and Python. They also host workshops and local hacker-type events. You can also start learning French and German. Mobile Development Meetups The meetup.com site for mobile development in San Francisco has literally dozens of area events and activities geared to collaboration and education. You'll find opportunities to learn HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. Many of the groups bring in guest speakers and host all kinds of workshops. There's everything from iOS to Eclipse to exotic stuff like RubyMotion. To wrap everything up, you might find it amusing to contrast the 1999 Salon dot-com related article “How The Internet Ruined San Francisco” with the more recent takeover from the startup crowd.
