advertisement advertisement advertisement advertisement Back in 2015, Heather Terenzio was giving a talk at a vocational school. After she provided an overview of the Boulder-based software development company she founded— Techtonic Group —a young man who helped cater the event came up to her. He told Terenzio that he’d been teaching himself to code for 10 years. He liked what Techtonic was doing, and said that if she were to hire him, she wouldn’t regret it. “We thought, well, why don’t we see what we can do with this kid?” says Terenzio. “He learned everything we taught him, and we had this epiphany that we were on to something interesting.” advertisement advertisement Techtonic had been struggling to find qualified developers, and outsourcing the work offshore just wasn’t cutting it. So why not create a formal program to allow people without a computer science degree to train for these jobs? Today, Techtonic is the first Department of Labor-approved apprenticeship program for coding. Participants apply to be part of the program, and once they’re selected, the company trains them, while paying them from day one. After the training period, Techtonic pairs each participant with a senior staff member to work on a…