Building What Comes Next

Ten years is a long time in technology, and an even longer time to keep meeting people at the edge of transition.

For ten years, Code Platoon has walked with our military community through those in-between seasons - helping people regain momentum, restore confidence, reconnect to professional identities, and access high-quality, family-sustaining careers in technology.

When Code Platoon launched its first cohort in 2016, ‘cloud’ mostly meant storage, AI was a niche headline, and a lot of people still assumed that military experience plus a strong work ethic would be enough to secure a stable civilian career. A decade later, the tools and the job titles may have changed, but our work remains the same: building clear, supported pathways into the tech industry for Veterans, service members, military spouses and their families.

If you’re military-connected, you’ve likely watched someone in your life navigate that gap and know the journey is anything but linear. It looks like a spouse updating their LinkedIn profile for the fourth time in six years - wondering how to explain another employment gap. It looks like a Veteran studying JavaScript late at night after a layoff, or an active service member overseas logging into a virtual classroom on Central Time - building projects with a cohort they depend on every week. On paper, these are training and employment questions; in real life, they’re about identity, family trajectory, and building what comes next.

Code Platoon was envisioned as meeting people at the intersection of those transitions - from recruitment, enrollment, and graduation to career services and direct placement.

Code Platoon is known for rigorous technical programming and strong placement outcomes, but our work has never just been about teaching people to code. It is about building pathways, community, and economic mobility for people whose lives have been shaped by service to this country - whose futures deserve the same depth of investment.

Today, Code Platoon is still meeting people where they are - with the same belief in their capacity and commitment. But the work carries a different weight now than it did in 2016. Automation, cloud-native infrastructure, and AI are reshaping what it means to be job ready, while our military-connected community continues to navigate employment barriers in civilian hiring systems.

People find their way to Code Platoon through different doors, a PCS order that upends a spouse’s job, a family legacy of service that shapes a first career decision, an unexpected layoff, or just a sense that the next decade could be something more.

This piece centers three alumni who came to Code Platoon through different doors, at different stages of transition. Together, their stories demonstrate what Code Platoon has always known: transition does not follow one path, and neither should opportunity.

The first door belongs to Paola.

Paola

  “Do I Belong in This Space?”

Paola had always been curious about technology. Years ago, she enrolled in a computer engineering program, but life intervened, and the degree remained unfinished. She became a nanny, then a full-time nanny, then a career nanny. She built a career around it. She supported her family. But the curiosity never left.

“I love what I was doing,” she says. “But it was always that thing. Since the beginning, tech was always what I wanted to do.”

As she got older, that dream began to feel less like a possibility and more like a relic of a younger self.

“Am I too old now? I’m not a very tech person. Do I belong in this space?”

She married a Marine Corps Veteran. They bought a home in Chicago. The mortgage was real.

The idea of returning to a traditional four-year college was financially out of reach. Paying fifteen or twenty thousand dollars for a coding bootcamp was equally impossible.

Then, late one night, scrolling through Instagram, a Code Platoon advertisement appeared in her feed. She had looked at other bootcamps before, but the price tags had always stopped her.

This one was different. This one mentioned “scholarships for military spouses."

“I literally started crying when I got the email saying I had been approved and that I had nothing to pay.”

But approval was not the same as admission. Paola had been out of school for nearly twenty years. To even qualify for the full-time cohort, she first had to complete an eight-week introductory course and then pass a technical assessment. She failed the first two attempts.

The instructor who administered the assessment was tough. But he was also encouraging. “I can see the improvement,” he told her. “You’re not there yet. Come back in two weeks.”

She worked with a tutor. She studied. On the third attempt, she passed.

Then came the harder conversation: quitting her full-time job, living on a single income for four months, and starting the in-person program in Chicago while her husband held down the household alone. “I married an amazing person,” she says simply. “Super supportive. He didn’t have any doubts in me.”

The first week of the cohort was brutal. “The first half of the cohort, I was always behind,” she said. She came home crying more than once. What kept her going was not abstract optimism. It was the daily, concrete presence of help.

During the day, there were tutors. In the evenings, there were more tutors. The structure assumed that students would struggle, and it built support around that assumption.

The turning point came toward the end, when students were asked to build their own projects. Paola drew on her years of experience as a nanny and built a childcare app. It was the first moment she felt her past and her future snap into alignment.

“That’s when I felt like, okay, I think I can do this. It’s not that bad.”

After graduation, the team did not disappear. Paola had expected to be handed a diploma and left to fend for herself. Instead, she was assigned a Career Services lead who conducted weekly check-ins, reviewed resumes, and coached her on how to follow up with recruiters without feeling like a nuisance.

“You have to keep reaching out,” she was told. “Don’t wait until they reach out to you.”

She applied that advice relentlessly. When an offer finally came from Travelers’ Engineering Development Program (EDP) in mid-December - three months after graduation, she was not surprised by the technical rigor of the company’s onboarding. The accelerated coding bootcamp that Travelers put her through felt, by comparison, manageable. “That month at Travelers was the easiest thing,” she says. “Looking back at that first week of Code Platoon, where I was crying and just not feeling like I belong, and then I come to Travelers and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m good.’”

Today, Paola is completing her first year as a software engineer in Atlanta. As her career continues to grow, she and her husband are considering building their future in the city they’ve grown to love together.

The future she once wondered whether she had waited too long to pursue is now the one she is building.

“What would I tell myself back then?” she considers. “Just take one day at a time. It won’t always be this hard.”

When Support Removes Barriers

Code Platoon did not teach Paola resilience. She arrived with that. What the program provided was a structure for the discipline she already had, a community that made struggle feel less isolating, and a Career Services team that refused to treat graduation as the end of the road.

Scholarships made the risk possible. Tutoring provided the scaffolding for what she did not yet know. Career Services’ persistence was matched by her own.

But the core work belonged entirely to Paola: returning to the assessment until she passed, committing to the future she wanted before it was fully secure, and continuing to show up even when the path asked more of her than she expected. That resolve lived in Paola before Code Platoon; the training only amplified it.

Cisco

 “What Am I Missing?”

Cisco, an Army Veteran, already knew what it meant to build a life in technology.

Before Code Platoon, before the move back to Anderson, South Carolina, before the long stretch of applications and uncertainty, he had spent years doing technical work at SRI International in Menlo Park. His path there had not been linear.

He first worked at the company as a security guard while completing his bachelor’s degree in computer science online. He had already taught himself web development.

He already knew he loved programming. What he wanted, at that point, was the credential that would make visible what he already knew he could do.

“I knew I had a love for it,” he said. “And I knew I had the ability to perform the work.”

People around him saw it too. Staff in the computer science division knew his goals. A former CEO encouraged him directly, telling him he was too intelligent and too talented not to pursue the work he wanted. Eventually, the possibility they had once talked about became real. Cisco moved from guarding the building to working inside its technical teams.

For five years, he worked as a computer scientist on complex government applications across robotics, embedded programming, and web development. Then, in November 2023, he was laid off.

Cisco packed up, sold his house, and moved back home to Anderson in June 2024. He wanted to be closer to family - to be available to help care for his mother. He wanted a life that made room for the people and commitments that mattered most.

Still, Cisco did not stop moving.

He volunteered with Operation Code as a tech lead. He took on full-stack development work where he could. He began looking for ways to bring STEM programming into his local community.

“It was so refreshing and rewarding,” he said, “to actually see our future engineers get excited about these projects.”

That was the person Cisco was when he found Code Platoon: someone trying to find his way back into the field with renewed clarity about what he wanted his work to mean.

He learned about Code Platoon through Operation Code and researched the program alongside other bootcamps. Cisco entered the program with more technical experience than many students. The training helped him reorient his background toward full-stack and web development, and the cohort gave him a place to contribute what he already knew.

When classmates struggled with React or full-stack projects, he often found himself helping in breakout rooms, almost like a teaching assistant.

“It made me feel like I was more prepared than I thought I was,” he said.

For Cisco, the deeper challenge came after graduation. He had been applying for roles, sending out resumes, and trying to understand why the responses were not coming back. He knew he needed help, not because he lacked ability, but because the job search itself had become a system he was navigating mostly alone.

That changed with Career Services.

From the beginning, Cisco said, Katherine and Rich kept him motivated. More importantly, they held him accountable. When he felt burned out from applying, they did not dismiss it. They understood - but they also did not let him disappear into it.

“They understand what you’re going through,” Cisco said. “But they also realize that it doesn’t end. It can’t stop. You can’t quit.”

The accountability mattered because it was relational. It was not a checklist sent by email or a set of links handed off after graduation. It was someone paying attention. Someone expecting him to keep going - when to encourage him and when to push.

Eventually, Cisco accepted a role with Allstate.

Today, Cisco is returning to work with a clearer sense of what he values now: proximity to family, work that feels meaningful, a life that leaves room for service, and a definition of success rooted in what matters most.

“I knew there was supposed to be more,” he said.

Now, the “more” he is looking for has a different shape. It looks like being present for the people he loves; helping children in Anderson see themselves as future engineers. It looks like taking what he has learned and empowering the next generation.

When Experience Finds Community

Cisco arrived at Code Platoon with years of experience, a computer science degree, and the instincts of someone who had already used technical skills in complex environments. What the training offered was a way to make that experience visible.

The harder work came after graduation, when applications, resumes, interviews, and silence from employers became their own kind of test.

That is where Career Services mattered most, providing the structure, accountability, and encouragement to keep moving - even when the process became exhausting.

For Cisco, the pathway had never disappeared. What he needed was support making his experience visible again, and a community that helped him keep moving until the next door opened.

Francisco

 “We’re Going to Figure This Out Together”

When Francisco came to Code Platoon, he was twenty-four years old, leaving the Marine Corps, and building a civilian life that would allow him to be present for family.

His daughter was a newborn. His background was infantry. The opportunities most visible to him felt too close to the life he was trying to move away from: long hours, time away, and career paths that could keep him from the people he most wanted to be near.

“I was looking for a job where I would be able to be with my family,” he says, “because I had already lost too much of that.”

Technology was not the obvious next step. In the Marine Corps, Francisco says, the closest he had come to working with computers was filling out forms. But a mentor introduced him to programming, and a fellow Code Platoon alum encouraged him to look seriously at the program.

That recommendation mattered. So did the support he received before he ever entered the classroom.

At the time, Francisco was still active duty and needed approval through his chain of command to participate. Code Platoon’s recruitment team helped him navigate that process, answering questions, staying closely engaged, and helping make the pathway feel possible while he was still serving.

However, once the immersive cohort began, ‘possible’ did not mean easy.

Francisco remembers the first lecture clearly. The topic was ‘Machines, Operating Systems, and Kernels’. None of it was familiar.

“That entire lesson went right over my head,” he says.

His response was not to step back. It was to start asking questions. He reached out to teaching assistants and instructors, asked for reading material, and tried to close the distance between where he was and where the program was moving.

“It was obvious to me that I was lagging behind some of my peers because they had that technical background,” he says. “But rather than let it demoralize me, I used it as, okay, I just got to step it up so I can keep up.”

The moment it began to click came near the end of the cohort, during personal project time. The structure changed. Students had to build something of their own, from idea to completion.

Francisco compares it to a puzzle.

“Everything in programming is just problem solving,” he says. “And it’s the same thing that we do in the military on a daily basis.”

After graduation, Francisco worked with startups, built technical experience, and continued developing as a full-stack engineer. Then he came back to Code Platoon as a teaching assistant.

The students noticed.

They asked Code Platoon to hire him. And then they kept asking.

“I would love to come back,” he remembers saying. “If that position ever opened up, I would be more than happy to take it in a heartbeat.”

He later taught Intro to Coding Live, and when a full-time instructor position opened, the call came from Rod - Francisco accepted immediately.

Francisco brings the perspective of someone who has moved through the full Code Platoon journey himself: student, alum, teaching assistant, instructor, and now someone helping build the next generation of military-connected technologists.

That perspective matters.

He knows what it feels like to enter the program without a technical background and have the first lecture go over your head. He also knows what it takes to move from confusion to fluency, from survival mode to problem-solving, from following the material to building something of your own.

That lived experience shapes the way Francisco teaches. It helps him understand when students need flexibility, when they need structure, when they need more time with a concept, and when they are ready to be pushed.

It also shapes how he thinks about curriculum.

What Lived Experience Makes Possible

Code Platoon’s programs are shaped by instructors, industry professionals, technical experts, and curriculum committees. Francisco values that expertise, but he brings another lens: the memory of learning this material from the beginning, as someone who had to build the foundation one piece at a time.

That perspective helps him distinguish between covering material and teaching it.

“This isn’t a program where we’re just mentioning things to you and expecting you to learn them on your own,” he says. “Here in Code Platoon, I can confidently say that what we do is actually teach.”

For Francisco, teaching means focusing on fundamentals, explaining what is happening underneath the code, and making sure students can use what they are learning. It means holding rigor and support together, not treating them as opposites.

That approach is what allows him to recognize growth as it happens. He talks about watching students arrive unsure of what they are doing, then seeing them near graduation asking sharper, more confident questions: how to integrate a third-party API, how to build a payment wall, how to solve a specific technical behavior in their application.

“They’re no longer just trying to keep up,” he says. “By then, they’re thinking like engineers.”

Francisco returned to Code Platoon with more than technical skill. He returned with the memory of being the student trying to keep up, the Marine transitioning out, the new father building a future, and the person starting with unfamiliar material and deciding to keep going.

In that full-circle movement, student to alum, teaching assistant to instructor, learner to curriculum builder, Francisco shows what ten years of impact can become when a program does more than graduate people. It brings them back to help build what comes next.

Ten years of impact does not look like one door. It looks like many.

It looks like Paola returning to a dream she thought had passed her by and discovering that she still belonged in the sector she had always wanted to enter.

It looks like Cisco, carrying years of technical experience into a new chapter, with Career Services helping him make that experience visible again.

It looks like Francisco moving from student to instructor, bringing the memory of his own transition into the way he teaches, supports, and challenges the students who come after him.

Across these stories, the through line is continuity.

Access matters. Rigorous training matters. Career support matters. Community matters. So does having people who walk with students from the first question to the next opportunity.

That is what Code Platoon has spent ten years building: not one pathway, but many.

And for every Veteran, service member, military spouse, or military family member wondering whether there is still time, still room, or still a way forward, the answer remains the same.

There is no wrong door. It’s never too late to start building what comes next.