Training was only half the problem.
A family connection in the coal industry and a partner asked whether people coming out of coal work could be taught to code. My response was essentially: why stop at teaching? Build an agency around the talent, focus the technology choices, and create a path from learning to paid client work.
Eleven candidates entered the initial effort; ten moved forward.
A workforce transition needed a learning system and a delivery system.
I had to figure out how to teach people who were starting from scratch while also building a company capable of delivering professional software. We standardized around a manageable technology foundation rather than letting every developer chase a different stack.
Drupal and web technologies became an important center of gravity, with later work also spanning mobile and interactive technologies. Agile became part of the learning environment itself.
- Created and assembled curriculum from multiple learning sources.
- Introduced version control, team workflows, and Agile delivery.
- Connected training directly to the kind of work the company intended to sell.
- Worked across architecture, engineering, operations, business development, communications, and company leadership.
The first Agile story was literally “How do I learn to code?”
That framing mattered. Learning was not treated as a separate prerequisite that had to end before real work could begin. The team practiced the habits of software delivery while acquiring the underlying skills.
Within roughly six months, the team had its first paying client and delivered its first website.
The strongest proof is that the path kept going.
One member of the original developer group later moved into remote application work for a major New York company while remaining in eastern Kentucky—a result that captures why the project mattered beyond any single website.
Creativity applied to a regional economic problem.
In 2017, Fast Company named me to its Most Creative People in Business list in connection with the work around Bit Source and the broader experiment in transitioning coal-industry talent into software.
Build people, process, product, and business as one system.
- See the larger opportunity inside the original ask.
- Design learning around real delivery.
- Create enough technical standardization for a new team to become productive.
- Operate beyond code. Architecture, hiring, training, sales, communications, operations, and leadership all mattered.