Each quarter, between two and four promising junior engineers from the Portland tech community are selected for Velocity, a five week incubator program designed to help accelerate their careers. Velocity participants hit the ground running towards the launch of a production-grade product which they design and build themselves. Our team of designers, developers, and project managers guide them through all of the phases of product development and mentor them using the same methodologies we use on all of our projects.

Our current pair of inspired engineers, Sheena Do and Caleb Stevenson, are beginning the third week of their adventure. They’re hard at work on LifeCollage, an Android app which allows users to create and share a continually growing time capsule of their lives. In the first weeks of the program, the Velocity engineers built a prototype Android application. In addition, they configured and deployed a remote server to store user data in the cloud with Amazon Web Services.

Because Velocity participants retain the intellectual property rights for what they build, Sheena and Caleb will be able to continue working on their idea even after the program is over. They might even found the next hot Portland tech startup!

Here’s what they have to say about their experience so far:

SHEENA

I joined the Android track at Epicodus specifically because I wanted to start a career in mobile app development, so I’m super excited to be at DevNow and working on making an Android app. It has been an amazing experience so far to be able to learn the development process in a real agency setting, and be surrounded by experts who are always willing to help us out. Although we don’t have enough time to explore VR during this 5 week program, that’s definitely something that I’m interested in pursuing in the near future.

CALEB

The Velocity program at DevNow was my top pick for after Epicodus. The mentorship we receive from the team here is invaluable. DevNow provides project management, a meeting with their lead designer, and access to programmers who are excited to help us develop our Android app. We’ve even been included in brainstorming sessions for their upcoming events! I’m very excited to be learning mobile development from such experienced and thoughtful programmers. I’ve learned a lot about how to program in the past two weeks and I’m excited to see what the next three weeks have in store!