Boulder Digital Arts’ CodeCraft boot camp is firm’s latest tech move

BOULDER — Bruce Borowsky and Zach Daudert weren’t thinking this far ahead when they co-founded Boulder Digital Arts almost 12 years ago.

“He was a web developer, and I was a filmmaker,” said Borowsky about their initial training session. “We offered a party and workshop (on using Final Cut Pro) and more than 120 people came.

“It was all about teaching practical skills (using emerging technology). People were really interested in that, and we had so many friends who were amazing at that.”

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From there the duo began hosting evening training sessions about once a week, on technology software such as Photoshop and Illustrator, or web design and digital filmmaking. The sessions often were held at the Masonic Lodge, but also traveled from locale to locale, meaning Borowsky and Daudert often were packing up and moving the presentation hardware along with coolers of food, beer, wine and soda.

“We started calling ourselves the BDA Catering Company,” Borowsky joked.

But after nine short months, the duo decided it was too much work for a truly part-time lark, threw in $300 apiece to turn their nonprofit into an LLC and started to expand. Since then, the firm has turned up almost every year on the BizWest list of fastest-growing companies, the Mercury 100. Last year it had revenues of about half a million dollars.

Once-a-week sessions have turned into multiple sessions most every week, with more hands-on instruction augmenting those demonstrations and four- or five-day certification programs coming on board. BDA started leasing its facility at 1600 Range St. in 2009, growing it from 3,000 to 6,000 square feet a couple years later. It just announced the acquisition of another 1,000 square feet in the same building.

But behind it all is a remarkable ability to keep pace with the rapidly changing technology curve. Daudert said employing professionals working in tech arenas as instructors has helped set BDA apart from other instructional organizations.

“The technology and the tool sets are going to change very often,” he said. “Knowing how to use the tools and why are key.”

So is knowing where and when to step forward.

BDA has just initiated one of its most ambitious moves to date, with the introduction of CodeCraft, a 10-week boot camp on mobile-first web design, focused on both browser- and server-side javascript and largely based on the Twitter Bootstrap 3 software stack. But it covers almost all the elements a mobile developer would require – including HTML5, CSS, AJAX, JSON, SSH/FTP, jQuery, Node.js, Angular.js, Express.js, MongoDB and SQL – but also focuses  on user interface and, in general, becoming a focused programmer.

CodeCraft will be a sister company to BDA, with its own LLC, but its roots and corporate mission will be immersed in the original company. Borowski said the reasoning to have two companies mostly revolved around branding a fairly revolutionary product, but new team members said the focus on training specifically for job-related skills remains at the heart of CodeCraft.

“I think the key thing is we are always iterating our curriculum. We need to be very agile to keep up with the latest tools and technology,” said Bill Adkins, campus director for CodeCraft. As with most people involved with BDA, Adkins came straight out of the Boulder tech startup community at Gnip, a social media data accumulator that recently was acquired by Twitter.

“Obviously, technological change with web and mobile development is really rapid,” Adkins said. “It’s very important to us that students are learning what they will be exposed to in their jobs.”

Also coming on board as a CodeCraft co-founder is chief financial officer James Graham, president of Bolder Business Advisors, CPA, PC in Boulder and San Diego.

Part of the focus here, the founders said, is to look for potential franchising opportunities down the road.

Currently the first CodeCraft class is set to graduate Tuesday, Dec. 15, and their craft will be on display for potential employees at a graduation event.

DBA made a similar move two years ago in Sarasota, Fla., combining forces with a co-working space, but Borowski and Daudert said that really amounted to more of an experiment that an investment. While the secret to replicating DBA’s success seems to be a critical mass of very creative technologists combined with a great need for that training, CodeCraft appears to be something that can be specially constructed for very exacting industry needs, perhaps more viable in many more markets.

“CodeCraft instructors are part of a team, not contractors,” said Adkins, noting that instructors are chosen by their depth of practical skills, especially in open-source coding.

CodeCraft courses are starting at around $9,500, which Borowski pointed out was extremely reasonable compared with similar programs.

In that respect, the new company doesn’t veer far from the course set by DBA 11 years ago, where memberships always have remained at $45 annually.

Importantly both Borowski and Daudert remain active in their chosen professions, along with running DBA and now CodeCraft, and both seem to like it that way.

“If we were better business people, we could make more money,” Daudert said. “But teaching people how to leverage technology is where we came from, and where our true motivation lies.”