Futurist Thomas Frey took time out of his busy speaking schedule for a short interview with Larry Nelson at W3W3 radio. This time Mr. Frey conversed with Larry about DaVinci Coders, the new beginner based Ruby On Rails program that he is putting together at DaVinci Institute…

It’s been a while, but we are back with Tom Frey, founder of the DaVinci Institute. Tom has a number of different programs that the DaVinci Institute puts on and they have a very special program coming up. As the ‘futurist’ Tom and the DaVinci Institute has recognized there are many technical challenges that we’re facing. In the face of these challenges, DaVinci is now offering a beginner based training program for computer programmers and it is oriented around the language ‘Ruby-on-Rails’, which is one of the hot new languages. Tom said, “We’re seeing there is such a demand for computer programmers – it’s just growing by leaps and bounds.” He told us the demand is coming from two directions, the old code that’s out there buried deep in the mainframe computers with the operating systems that run the day to day operations of major corporations. A lot of this code is written in the old languages like Fortran and Cobalt. The people that have been maintaining this code are nearing retirement age. So the corporations are being faced with a major decision, do we scrap all this old stuff and start over from scratch or do we hand it off to a big company like IBM to manage all this? The fact is there are not a lot of new Cobalt programmers coming out of colleges today. IBM is trying to get colleges to continue training cobalt programmers – but students are looking for the newest programming languages like Ruby-on-Rails, Python, JavaScript, the newer hot languages. So people going to college would rather be writing apps for mobile devices than they would be working on mainframe computers. What’s unique and different about the DaVinci approach is that it is beginner based. There are a lot of programs out there that are 3 days to a week long, but they’re for experienced programmers. So, getting into the field is very tough, unless you’re going to college. At DaVinci, they’re offering an eleven week program so you can go from zero to programmer in less than 90 days…listen for more…

Listen to the interview.