---
title: The Agency of Learning
kind: company
role: Founder
years: 2022 – 2025
status: sunset
summary: >-
  Nonprofit I founded and ran to make junior Rails developers job-ready by
  shipping real software in a real team.
links:
  - label: Rails Foundation partnership
    url: >-
      https://rubyonrails.org/2023/5/30/rails-foundation-and-agency-of-learning-partner-for-event-app
  - label: Build and Learn — Episode 24
    url: 'https://buildandlearn.dev/24'
tags:
  - nonprofit
  - founder
  - education
  - rails
order: 3
---

Started The Agency of Learning in 2022 to address a problem I'd been chewing
on since the Bloc days: the gap between "finished a bootcamp" and "ready to
be hired." The Agency was a nonprofit where junior Rails developers came
together — mostly over Discord and Zoom — to close that gap by shipping real
software in a real team environment.

We contributed to the CASA app from Ruby for Good, and some of our members
ended up hired into my for-profit agency (Sierra Rails). The most visible
work was the mobile web app for the debut Rails World conference in Amsterdam
in 2023, built end-to-end by the Agency in partnership with the Rails
Foundation — and shipped with zero unhandled exceptions in production.

I wound the Agency down in 2025. The alumni network is still alive and well:
Simmon Li runs the Toronto Ruby meetup now, and Ariel Fogel — who was on my
team at Bloc — was one of the people who pitched in along the way. Several
others have gone on to roles I couldn't have placed them in without the work
we did together.