 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston-era studio here for a CUBE Conversation. Really like when we can dig in to help some of the nonprofits in our industry. Gonna be talking about training, helping other people lift up their careers. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Jerome Hardaway. He is the founder of Vets Who Code. Coming to us down from Nashville, Jerome, I seem to remember a time where I was able to travel, did some lovely hiking, even saw a bear. Last time I was down in Nashville. Thanks so much for joining us. Roger that, thank you. Funny story, I saw a cow on the loose while driving on the highway yesterday. So not much has changed. Thank you guys for having me. Yeah, it is a little bit of strange times here in the COVID area. I live kind of suburban Massachusetts area. One of my neighbors did report a small bear in the area. I'm definitely seeing more than just the usual, what kind of wild turkeys and the like that we get up in New England. But let's talk about Vets Who Code. So you're the founder, the name doesn't leave much up for us to guess what you do, but tell us a little bit as to the inspiration and the goals of your organization. Roger that, Vets Who Code is the first veteran founded, operated and led a remote 501C3 that focuses on training veterans regardless where they are in modern and bleeding edge technologies. Our stack right now, I would say is focused more towards front-end DevOps with a lot of serverless technologies being built in. And you know, that's pretty much all, well, exactly what we do. Well, awesome. Been loving digging into the serverless ecosystem in the last few years. Definitely an exciting area. Help us understand a little bit. You know, who comes and joins this? What skill set do they have to have coming in? And explain a little bit the programs that they can be part of. Yeah, cool. So we run Vets Who Code like a mixture between a tech company or a tech nonprofit, I guess, using those practices, while also using military practices as well. And the people that come in are veterans and military spouses. And we try to use a pattern matching practice of showcasing like, hey, you know, these are the things used in the military. This is how it translates to the tech side. Like, you know, our sit reps is what you guys would call stand up. Kanban is what we would call systems checks and frag orders, op orders, things like that. Or, you know, our SLPs. So what we turn around, we just train them, retrain them so that way they can understand the lingo, understand how things, how you code, move and communicate and make sure that these guys and girls, they know how to work as job script engineers in a serverless community. As of right now, we've helped 252 veterans in 37 states get jobs. Our social economic impact's been, I think it's at 17.6 million right now. So, and all from the comfort of their homes. I think that's like the, and free. Those are like the coolest things that we've been able to do. Well, that's fascinating. Jerome, I heard something that you've talked about, you know, leveraging the military organizational styles. I'm just curious, you know, there's, in the coding world, a lot of times we talk about Conway's Law, which is that the code will end up resembling the look of the organization. And you talk about DevOps. DevOps is all about, you know, various organizations that are collaborating and working together. It seems a little bit different from what I would think of, you know, traditional military command and control. So, is that anything you've given any thought to? Is there some of the organizational pieces that you need to talk to people about moving into these environments compared to what they might have had in the military? Negative. I think the biggest misconception that we have is that people when you're talking about how the military moves, they're thinking of the military of yesteryear, about 20, 30, 40 years ago. They're not thinking of global war on terrorism veterans and how we move and things like that. We understand distributed teams. We understand, because we call, I mean, that's what we've done and Sintaf and Sintcom and Iraq and Afghanistan. So we are already doing a lot of this stuff. We're just, you know, naming it different. So that's part of the thing that, you know, we have as an advantage at Vetsuko, because all the people who are educators, they're veterans who learn how to code and they've been working in the industry and they know, so when they're teaching, they know the entire process that a veteran's gonna go through. So like that's how, you know, we focus on things and also the organizational structure for us first term to second term, veterans is pretty normal if you're coming out within the last, you know, heck, 10 years. Yeah, absolutely, that's wonderful. And I've had the opportunity to work with plenty of people that had come from the military, very successful in the tech industry. Definitely tend to be, you know, hard workers and engaged in what they're doing. Curious, you talk about being able to do this remotely and then it is free. What's the impact of the current global pandemic? Everything that's happening here in 2020 been on what you're doing and your resources? Of the impact, I mean, not unfortunately, but fortunately it has been nothing but positive. It's been crazy, we've gotten more applications. We have, you know, people are seeing that during, you know, I was the crazy person in the room in 2014 when I was saying nonprofits should move to a remote first protocol. So that way they could have greater impact for less financial resources. And back then I was the like, what are you talking about? This is what we've already done well now. Everybody was scrambling to try to figure out how to help people without being in the same room with them. We were like, oh, okay, it's Tuesday. So we've gotten influx of people applying and influx of people sending me trying to get into our next cohort in August. It's just, you know, the biggest thing that has happened for Vetsu Code is that like it's been a really positive experience for us, which is really weird to say. But I think that's a, you know, my doomsday Murphy's Law style of preparing. Like I assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So I try to, you know, prepare for that. So being open source, being serverless, being having everything in a manner to where in case I was out of the situation, other people could operate, having this distributed team. So there are other leaders that can take over and do things. It's all stuff that, you know, I guess I got from the military. So, you know, we were prepared because there was absolutely zero pivot for us. If anything, there's been more resources. We've been able to dive deeper and more subjects because people have had more time. But, you know, we can dive deeper in AWS. We started a lunch and learn every two weeks. We actually have a lunch and learn next week with Dr. Lee Johnson and she's gonna be talking. We opened that to all juniors and entry-level developers, regardless of whether you're a veteran or not. We just throw it on Twitter and let them get in. And her, that focus will be on tech ethics. Like we all know right now we've been leading the charge on trying to make sure people are super charging their skills during this timeframe. So that's what, you know, it's been very positive. I've been working with Mashi Magazine, Front End Masters. It's been awesome. Well, that's wonderful. Wish everyone had the mindset coming into 2020 because it does seem that anything that could go wrong has. Curious, you know, once people have skilled up and they've gone through the program, what connection do you have with the industry? How do you help with job placement and that sort of activity? That is the most asked question because that is the thing that people expect because of code schools. Because of our educational protocols, we don't really need that issue because our veterans are skilled enough to hire managers know the quality that we produce. I live in Nashville and I've only been able to place one veteran that I've trained locally in the community because famed companies have snatched up every other veteran I've ever trained in the community. So things like that, you know, it's not a problem because usually 80% of our veterans have jobs before they even graduate. So you're literally picking people who, you know, they know they have the potential to get at big companies if they put the work in. And you know, it's just as they come, we actually have people, I think a company reached out to me yesterday and I was like, I don't even have people for you. Like, they already have jobs or I'm in a situation now where all my senior devs are looking for famed companies. Because that's one of the things we do is that we support our veterans from reentry to retirement. So we're now like other co-schools where they only focus on that 30 to 60 to 90 days so that first job, our veterans, they keep coming back to re-skill, get more skills, come up to lunch and learns, come to our Slack side chats to, you know, become better programmers. So we help several of our programmers go from inch-level dev to senior dev from absolutely zero experience. I think that's the most rewarding thing when you see a person who, they came in knowing nothing and then three years later, like after the cohorts, they've got their job and then they come back after they got their jobs, they wanna get more skills and they get another job and then they come back and the next thing you know, you know, like one of my favorites, Schuster, he starts at a local web shop, a web dev shop in Savannah, Georgia and then next thing you know, oh, he's in Amazon three years later and you're like, oh, wow, we did that, that's awesome. So like that's the, that's the path that we do and it's awesome. I'm curious, are there certain skill sets that you see in more need than other? And I'm also curious, do you recommend or do you help people along with certain certifications thinking, you know, the cloud certifications definitely have been on the rise the last couple of years? I feel like the cloud certifications have been on the rise because it's expensive to like test for that stuff, like if a person messes up unless you have like a very dedicated environment to where they can't mess up, they can cost you a lot of money, right? So you want that cert, right? But for us, it's been, we just focus on what we like to call front end DevOps. We focus on Jamstack, which is JavaScript APIs and markup, also along with a lot of server lists so we're using AWS, we're using, so they're learning LambdaFact functions, all this stuff. We're using a query language called GraphQL. We're using Apollo with that query language. We're using some node, React, Gatsby and a lot of third-party APIs to do like a lot of heavy lifting because we believe that the deeper dive that a person has in a language and being able to manipulate and utilize APIs that they can, the better they will be, right? So in the same way that colleges do it but a more modern take, like colleges, they give you the most painful language to learn which is usually like C, right? Where you have to make everything a very low-level language. And then you're going through this process of building and because of that, other languages are easier because you've felt the pain points. We do the same thing, but with JavaScript because it's the most accessible, painful language on earth, like that's why I called it with wire magazine last year anyway. So Jerome, you've laid out how you're well organized. You're lean and financially making sure that things are done responsibly. Want to give you the opportunity though. What's the call to action? Vetsu code, you're looking for more pieces to participate, is it sponsorships? What work in the community look to engage? Roger that, we are looking for two things. One, we're always looking for people to help support us. We're open source, we're on GitHub sponsors. Like the people who we were open source but the people that do most of our tickets are the students themselves. So that's one of the best things about us. Like being, there's no better feeling at having something in production that works, right? That actually does something, right? Like, oh, this actually helps people, right? So we help have our veterans like actually pull tickets and do things like that. But we also, we build, we're building out teams that they are on all the time as well. We have our new tutorials team where veterans, they literally build front facing tutorials for people on the outside. So that way they can learn little like skills as we also have podcast team. They're always podcasting, always interviewing people in the community from our mentors to our students to our alumni. And so just, you know, let's throw a podcast on Spotify, Vets Who Code, the Vets Who Code podcast and, you know, sponsor us on GitHub. Wonderful, Jerome, I want to give you the final word. You're very passionate. You've got a lot of interest in, loved hearing about, you know, some of the skill sets that you're helping others with. What's exciting you these days? What kind of things are you digging into, you know, beyond Vets Who Code? Oh man, everything serverless dude. Like as a front end, as a person who was full stack and moved to front end, this has never been a more exciting time to learn how to code because there's so many serverless technologies and it's leveling the playing field for front end engineers, just knowing a little bit of like server side code and having DevOps skills and being able to work in a CLI, like you can do like Jamstack and the people who are using it, like you have Nike, you have governments. It's just, it's such an exciting time to be a front end. So I'm just like, you know, and just seeing also how people are like really turning towards wanting their data more open source. So that's another thing that's like really exciting for me. Like I've never been a person that, you know, was very high brow when it came to talking about code. I felt like that was kind of boring, but seeing like how, when it comes to like how code is actually helping normal, like average everyday people and how the, you know, the culture as a whole is starting to get more hip to how, you know, API is like our running the world and how tech is being leveraged for and against them. You know, I am like on fire with these conversations. So I try to contain it because I don't want to scare anyone on TV, but we could talk like, I could talk for hours so that stuff, I love it. Well, Jerome, thank you so much for sharing with our community, everything you're doing a wonderful activity, Vets Who Code. Definitely call out to the community, make sure, you know, check it out, support it if you can, and tie so much in, Jerome. I've got a regular series I do called Cloud Native Insights that are poking at some of those areas that you were talking about, serverless and some of the emerging areas. So, Jerome, thanks so much for joining, pleasure having you on the program. Roughly that, thank you for having me. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the videos that we have as well as siliconangle.com for the news and the write-ups of what we do. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching The Cube.