Coding Bootcamp Boom Continues With Hack Reactor Buy

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San Francisco computer programming school Hack Reactor has agreed to acquire a fellow coding education company called MakerSquare, which has campuses in San Francisco and Austin, Texas.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. MakerSquare will keep its name and staff, but it will adopt much of the Hack Reactor curriculum and admissions process, and it will take advantage of the job placement program developed by Hack Reactor.

Code bootcamps—which attempt to teach students the basics of programming or take experienced programmers to the next level in just a few weeks or months—have cropped up all over the world, especially the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite hitting a snag last year when California state regulators noted that most of these schools weren’t quite operating legally, the business has boomed. Last June, test preparation company Kaplan announced its acquisition of Dev Bootcamp, one of the earlier players in the market. And now we have another acquisition.

Hack Reactor has been expanding beyond San Francisco in recent months with its “extension school” program, which offers partners the chance to start a Hack Reactor campus in their own city. But in Austin, it opted to acquire an existing school rather than start a new one from scratch. “We thought it was important to bring in people who shared our values and had a proven track record of that,” says Hack Reactor CEO Anthony Phillips.

The biggest change for MakerSquare—its new curriculum—was already in the works before the acquisition. The school intends to focus on the JavaScript programming language. Traditionally, programmers used Javascript to write code that runs inside web browsers, but now they’re using it to write code that runs on computer servers, code that drives the heart of online services. As a result, Phillips says, MakerSquare can now focus on teaching only one language for both browser-side and server-side programming.

Plus, he says, there’s a growing demand from employers for JavaScript developers. “We’re still seeing lots of Ruby developer jobs. But we’re seeing a huge uptick in JavaScript developer positions.”