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Overview
The Code Bureau aims to become an ecosystem for educating web developers and creating the next generation of IT start-ups. This will be achieved through heavy use and contribution to open source tools and by engaging young, highly motivated persons at very early stages in their career.
TCB consists of three seperate tiers:
- An educational facility (The Academy)
- A consultant business (The Business)
- An incubator (The Lab)
Each tier serves a unique purpose but contributes towards the common goal of bringing state-of-the-art web development consulting services and innovations to the market. The Academy aims to attract and train new developers, the Business will supply students and employees revenue generating work and the Lab will encourage cultivation of new and exciting ventures.
The Academy
The Academy aims to continuously train and supply the other two sections of the organization with programmers. Through careful integration with the Business & the Lab, all programmers in the Academy will regularly be presented with live projects from real businesses.
The actual educational process is going to be built on five concepts:
- An online portal for students & staff: The students need guidance in their educational process, and both students and employees need a highly functional and feature rich communication channel.
- E-Learning: The courses for students rely heavily on already existing online academies to teach the basic web development skills. The material provided by TCB consists of advanced tutorials, examples and exercises that pick up where the e-Learning tools have left off.
- Open Source: Since TCB only uses and teach open source technologies, there are virtually no software or licensing costs. The students themselves can also install everything on their own computers, and even use it for commercial gains.
- Integration with the Business & the Lab: During the learning process, students are presented with tasks from live projects, both from the Business' clients and the Lab's startups. These tasks will be of varying difficulty and responsibility so as to be a natural and inspiring part of the learning process.
The Business
To finance the other two tiers of TCB, the business intends to create revenue by producing work for paying customers. Hopefully TCB programmers will be able to spend 20-80% of their time producting code for paying customers.
The web design industry might be one of the most competitive industries currently active. It's focus on both design and logic with the possibilities of very good pay makes it attractive for many. There are also constantly new tools and libraries being developed that makes introduction to the industry easier than every before (tools like WordPress).
Web development has incredibly low financial barriers of entry. Especially considering the growth of open source solutions, the costs involved in becoming a web developer are next to zero.
As the future growth of the market is expected to remain at high levels.
In essence, the industry is being overpopulated with designers, while programmers remain scarce.
Through the use of bleeding edge technologies and producing extremely high quality products, TCB intends to become a renowned web consultancy other companies employ to produce their code.
The Lab
The ultimate goal of The Code Bureau is to create an environment that stimulates the growth of entirely new ideas, projects and companies.
The internet industry is very low on capital requirements. The main requirement is simply time from talented coders.
Instead of relying on venture capitalists to finance companies, and thus loosing
Eventually, the Lab should have all the competence required to assist the new ventures.
In the software and web industry, "the majority of operating expenditure consists of research and development (or R&D) costs and marketing spending." http://marketrealist.com/2014/07/overview-understanding-software-industry-cost-structure/