Dave Paola

2015 Distinguished Alumni Service Award

What began as an experiment in online mentorship turned into a successful company for Dave Paola, who is co-founder and CTO of Bloc, the world’s largest online software development boot camp.
Unlike other online education endeavors, Bloc’s courses employ a hands-on apprenticeship model in which students work one-on-one with a mentor to build software products, with 12-week programs in web and mobile development and web design.

Before starting Bloc, Paola was a software engineer at Kontagent/Upsight, a scalable analytics and marketing platform for web and mobile app developers. He worked on a customer-facing dashboard and an internal tools suite during the launch of the company’s kSuite product.

The chair of SIGSoft in ACM@UIUC, Paola began programming when he was in grade school.