This morning I had a great visit from one of our Operation Code members, an Army veteran who’s looking to relocate to Portland, Ore. Kayla Asay just graduated Code Fellows Seattle studying Full-Stack JavaScript and looking to relocate to the City of Roses. While we conduct virtual career and employment support via our Slack channel, nothing beats in person. In the Infantry, it’s called, “Eyes on the objective.” In my office, we discussed the various Portland startups hiring and made several intros, including Marty Nelson, CEO and Chief Instructor at Code Fellows PDX (soon to be Alchemy Code Labs).

It was wonderful to see Marty respond so quickly to my request to meet w/ Kayla and share his insights on the local startup job market and extend his network to Kayla. A few startups I suggested to Kayla:

  • New Relic. New Relic is located in Big Pink and hosts a variety of tech meetups, including the Portland Ruby Brigade. Their app monitoring software helps startups get a pulse of all facets of their web application, and while they are headquartered in San Francisco, the Portland branch has a sizeable and growing software engineering component. What’s cool is they’ve hired several code school bootcamp graduates, most notably my friends Maureen Dugan and Nuatu Tseggai. Both graduates of Epicodus.

  • Urban Airship. Portland startup Urban Airship headquartered in The Pearl also hires coding bootcamp graduates and another staple of the local startup community.

  • NedSpace. Now, you’re probably asking why Portland’s oldest and premier co-working space and well there’s an answer. Key here isn’t that they are located in downtown Portland, or that their network is massive, but the community. When Mark Grimes sends out emails to the list serve they don’t get ignored, archived or unsubscribed he gets responses. As a newly minted code school graduate it’s worth getting a hot seat here and building out your portfolio and engaging with all the startups, developers and designers housed here. That, and at least every startup here is hiring someone technical or knows someone that is. Good place for juniors (disclaimer: I launched my other startup, bilingualhire.co from here when they were located on 5th & SW Clay and Mark was nothing but generous and supportive as an entrepreneur learning to code).

  • Unearth nontraditional companies. Several coding bootcamp graduates have gone onto be the first or second software developers at nontraditional companies where software isn’t their first focus, but rather something that needs to be worked behind the scenes to regain the competitive advantage. These local companies range from construction companies to healthcare institutions, and manufacturing. In fact, my brother Victor Molina, went onto rise through the ranks at the general contractor he’s at in Tacoma, Wa. after finishing his .NET studies at Coder Camps. Remember: once your technical, you’re almost indispensable. And, as Paul Graham, like to say, “Every company is a software company.”

  • Portland Startups Switchboard. This unique ask & offer platform provides users an ability to ask something of the Portland Startup community say, “I just graduated Code Fellows Seattle and looking to relocate to Portland and would be so honored for feedback on my blog, portfolio” or “I’m relocating to Portland after completing Full-Stack JavaScript studies at Code Fellows Seattle and looking to learn more about your industry. I’ll happily buy you a cup of coffee for your time.”

Lastly, I advised Kayla to get with her Operation Code mentor and request an Interview Cake scholarship– to help her nail and button down her interviewing skills.

See previous blog post w/ Kyle.

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