The Agency of Learning
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.