Blog

Hello World

So every blog starts with a first post, the programming equivalent of "Hello World" I guess. We’re going to use this blog to post occasional thoughts and musings on software, trending web tech, CRM and general techie stuff. The key focus though is on something else entirely.

For this "Hello World" post I want to tell you about something we are very excited about and hope it's interesting in a boarder sense too. I'm sure it's not unique but to be honest I don’t think a lot of people are attempting it particularly in a company our size - possibly for good reason, time will tell!

Hopefully we can make it work, we are willing to take a risk and give it a go and most importantly we are open to the idea of it falling flat on its face and ending badly. None of us want that to be the outcome but it's a real possibility. If it works though it could be the start of something awesome. So what's the big idea?

Trainees x 2 and the seed of something we are tentatively the "Antelle Academy".

Antelle, the Isle of Man, the UK and the world as a whole need more developers. Honestly have you seen how in demand developers are? They are hard to find, harder to attract and often even harder to hold on to once you have them. Their skills and developer Kung-Fu are driving innovation across all sectors, building wealth and fuelling the economy.

The traditional route into software development is in most cases a reasonably formal affair:

School > Collage / University > Trainee Developer

We are trying this:

Anything > Trainee Developer

That's right, we have (and will) consider anyone from any social or educational background who is, we believe, able to become a trainee developer. We have found our first two trainees now. They start shortly, have we got it right? Time will tell.

It's going to be an interesting journey for them and for us. You will be able to follow along and see how they get on - oh we have put it into their contracts that they have to blog here about their experiences though it all.

We will be as open and honest as possible about how they develop [pun intended], issues, lessons learned (there will be a tonne of mistakes made by them, by us and by me personally) but we are pretty smart and usually learn from our mistakes.

The next series of posts from me will dig a little into the drivers for taking this on, what we hope to achieve with it all, plans for the future and how we found our two new trainees - Ben and Joseph. They join us on the 24th of August 2015, come back a find out how they are doing.

I'm Tony Jones, owner of Antelle, developer, techie, husband, father of two, juggler of priorities and entirely too tall for my own good.