An interview with Melanie Hall

Melanie Hall came to Nashville in 2012 because she was passionately involved at a non-profit. She supported herself by applying her college training as a designer. Like many designers we have met, Melanie realized that her design training didn’t really prepare her to design for the web. She needed an understanding of how (at least) basic level coding worked. Melanie joined the second student cohort at NSS in January 2013 and today she is still passionate about her non-profit, still passionate about design, and she is a working full-stack software developer.

In this episode of Stories from the Hackery, Melanie Hall chats with Clark Buckner about her transition from design to development, and about the early days of NSS. From Cohort 2 to front and back end software developer, Melanie’s experience at NSS shaped her career prospects, and helped her become acquainted with the Nashville tech community. Melanie’s advice to new students in the Nashville area is simple: take the time to learn something new. You never know where it may lead.

EPISODE 5 HIGHLIGHTS

1:10 Intro to Melanie Hall: passionate volunteer, designer, coder 
2:00 A designer realizes the need to understand coding 
3:30 Serendipity at Centresource’s mixer 
4:05 The NSS opportunity: providing the structure to learn code 
5:00 Building something helpful 
7:45 Reflections of the Nashville tech community 
10:30 The Cohort experience 
11:15 Meeting current students 
12:00 Final thoughts: then and now, constantly learning