To help feed the needs of Wilmington’s growing high-tech sector, an Atlanta-based company is bringing a two-week crash course in coding basics to town this August.

As part of its Pop-Up Code initiative, Tech Talent South will present a consolidated version of its eight-week Code Immersion Program, according to a news release from the company. Course highlights include Ruby on Rails, HTML and CSS, Twitter Bootstrap, domain modeling for database-backed web applications and understanding and using application program interfaces (APIs).

The course is designed for beginners; no tech background or experience in programming is necessary, the company states on its website.  Dates are August 3-14 in the evenings, with one all-day Saturday session, according to the release. The application period is now open.

Cost of the course is $2,250. If a participant wants to enroll afterward in TTS's full-time or part-time code immersion program, a full or half refund is available.

With the spread of the tech industry to cities across the country, TTS co-founder Betsy Idilbi “wanted a way to quickly add to these communities, while also considering time and cost of more traditional programs in cities like New York and Los Angeles,” the release stated. “Seeing the wildly successful idea of ‘pop-up shops,’ Idilbi thought, why not pop-up code schools too?”

Idilbi, in the release, describes the short course as a “trial run” for folks who want to dip their toes into the programming pond. It could help develop a larger pool of talent for local businesses, said Jim Roberts, former director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of North Carolina Wilmington, who arranged for the company to bring its pop-up course to town.

“Wilmington Is eager to partner with Tech Talent South to bring more tech talent to the market for growing companies like NextGlass, nCino, Go Energies and other emerging growth companies at the coast,” Roberts said in the release. “As Wilmington matures as a potential tech hub, we will need more tech talent and more skilled labor to fill these great jobs.”

Area colleges are seeing increasing interest in courses that prepare students for careers in programming and web development.

While enrollment in its network administration and information technology program tracks has been steady over time, Cape Fear Community College’s Computer Technology degree program is experiencing more demand for its software development and web development tracks, according to Melissa Watson, who chairs CFCC’s business technologies department.

“In the last five to ten years there has been quite an increase in the number of companies coming into the area and wanting these skills,” she said recently. “They need people with skills like mobile app development, data analysis and data base programming. Now we’re seeing students’ interest picking up.”

That’s also true at Brunswick Community College, where the computer information technology program enjoys a healthy enrollment, according to J. Burton Browning, chairman of business, engineering and technology. With the right skills, he said recently, software and web developers aren't limited to jobs available locally. “A web developer can live in Wilmington and work for a company in Chicago," he said. "We’re globally connected now.”

The information technology major at University of North Carolina Wilmington – a hybrid computer science/information systems operation management program – has “dramatically taken off,” according to Laurie Patterson, who chairs the Department of Computer Science.

“We just completed our second year of offering it, and we had more students at the end of our first semester than we had envisioned to have at the end of our second year,” she said.