I am continually impressed with the startup community that is growing so fast out in Chicago.  I was there last week for some (intense and awesome) meetings, and while in town I dropped by Code Academy (codeacademy.org, not to be confused with codecademy.com) to check in since I was there out in March for their last demo day.

I was blown away, Neal (great Tedx video from Neal), Mike, and the rest of their staff have been helping make Code Academy continually cooler.  They’re in some amazing office space in downtown Chicago (1871, which is this beautiful, huge collaborative work space that has gone from hosting 0 to 80 startup companies in 3 months) and they keep expanding their programs.  If you want to learn to develop Ruby on Rails web apps or do web design, I can’t imagine a better approach than their intense 12-week bootcamp.

Code Academy’s next demo day is tomorrow night, and it’ll be webcast if you want to check it out.

It’s exciting to see this technology startup community building so fast in Chicago, and I hope to see something similar take off in DC (#dctech is already cool, now we just need a central hub for startups to get together and make things happen).