The Episcopal Church in Navajoland has partnered with a technology company to teach students web development. Cultivating Coders, an Albuquerque-based “boot camp” teaches students full-stack development and trains them for both front and back end website creation, learning Angular, CSS3, HTML5, Javascript, MySQL and PHP. “Alongside these languages, we also work on design concepts, planning, execution, system administration and other tasks that are a part of the full stack of skills required to compete in this industry,” said the company’s CTO, Charles Sandidge. Most of the students will be hired by the Episcopal Church in Navajoland to form Cheii’s Dev Shop, a new web-development company based at All Saints Church. David Bailey, Bishop of Navajoland, said “We recognize that computer coding right now is big and something not available on the Navajo reservation.”
The students are focused three projects – human resources software for the development shop, a rebuilding the Episcopal Church in Navajoland’s website, including event and messageboard software for the 10 congregations, and FastCasualFine.com, a restaurant review website.
Information for this story came from The Farmington Daily Times
(Photo: Jon Austria/The Daily Times)





This brings to mind the Navajo “Code Talkers” in World War II.
Now a different kind of code!
That was also my first thought. The movie Windtalkers, with Nicholas Cage and Adam Beach, was what came to mind.
I’m so glad you caught that, Jay! That was the first thing I thought of, too! 🙂
This looks like a great initiative, providing training in skills that can be used locally to deliver websites for clients without the need for the students to move away from the Navajoland to find jobs.
Can the Cafe track this story? As the students complete the boot camp and as Cheii’s Dev Shop gets up and running, I encourage parishes and dioceses to contract with them for their own website design and support.