Don’t let the name fool you—Femgineer serves both men and women.
Femgineer, a company that provides continuing education to the technology sector, just launched a new Ruby on Rails course.
It’s not for tech newbies. The 9-week live online course addresses the need for continuing technology education—a need that has increased with the rate of change in the industry. The company’s curriculum includes technology and entrepreneurship, largely targeting startup technical leads and co-founders.
In 2010, Femgineer founder Poornima Vijayashanker was starting a new company, BizeeBee, and wanted to develop her prototype using Ruby on Rails. While Poornima has a degree from Duke in electrical engineering and computer science and was the founding engineer of Mint.com, her experience was not in Rails; she had spent the past several years doing Java development. So in 2010, she spent hours studying a hodgepodge of tutorials and books to learn Rails.
She learned the technology and is still leading BizeeBee, but the lack of educational resources for developers stuck with her.
At the same time, Poornima had been maintaining a blog called Femgineer for several years. In 2012, there was noticeable growth in the number of requests she received through the blog for mentoring, speaking engagements, and educational resources.
A serial entrepreneur, Poornima decided to tackle the technology education problem head on and turn Femgineer into a business that helps those in the technology sector keep pace with ever-changing trends.
“We serve people who are already in tech because nobody else is currently servicing them. Education right now is geared toward people who are new to development,” Poornima explains.
In August, after several years in Palo Alto, Poornima, moved back to the Triangle to teach a course at Duke Pratt School of Engineering.
The new Rails course is Femgineer’s second live online course offering. The company’s first course, which went through the first of several iterations this January, was an 8-week ‘base course’ on lean product development. It attracted a mix of developers and non-technical entrepreneurs.
Future courses, like the Rails course, will offer more specialized tracks for those in development, design, and business development.
If you’re currently at a startup, Femgineer courses will help members of your team in their respective specialized functions, while at the same time removing barriers between those with different skill sets.
Poornima says, “We want our courses to help break down silos. We don’t want engineers to hate marketers and marketers to hate engineers.”
This vision makes sense. With small teams and cross-functional responsibilities, startups can’t afford to have silos hindering team alignment and growth.
If you haven’t met her, come out to the next ExitEvent Startup Social (she was at Aaron Houghton’s for the September Social). In the meantime, verified entrepreneurs in the ExitEvent network can access a 20% discount on the new Femgineer course, typically priced at $1495. Just use the promo code “ExitEvent” when you apply, and she’ll confirm with us.
