Last week we spoke with David Yunker, Dan Ventura, and Elliot Williams. Our students find their way into development in a variety of ways. Whether our students stumble into it or seek it out to make a career change, they all experience growth as they learn to overcome the obstacles in a bootcamp environment. By building apps for needs they see in their community, they become invested in creating and learning. This week we hear from Delaine and Chris.
Check out all of the recent grads on the Cohort 15 class website and theCohort E3 class website.
Delaine Wendling
Delaine’s interest in development began when she had the opportunity to teach Computer Science. Having been a high school math teacher and cross-country coach for three years prior, Delaine has always been curious about how people make computers do amazing things. The opportunity to teach computer science was an opportunity to dive into something that was fascinating while empowering young people to learn a valuable skill. While learning the programming portion of the curriculum, Delaine realized she wanted to become a developer.
Delaine was a part of Cohort 15 and told us there were plenty of obstacles during the bootcamp. “I never had a day at NSS where I didn’t need to debug my code many times,” she said. “Overcoming obstacles is the life of a programmer.”
For her front-end capstone project, Delaine built a National Park Trip Planning app. The app was inspired by her love of visiting National Parks and experience with planning trips to the more remote areas of the parks. The National Park Trip Planning app helps users learn more about the parks and allows them to plan trips collaboratively with their friends and family. To build the app, Delaine integrated the Google Maps API to show users where the trailheads were located. She also used AngularJS to organize and architect the front-end code, Grunt for linting and compiling SASS to CSS, Bootstrap for responsive design, and Firebase for authentication and data storage.
As a side project with a few classmates, Delaine helped build a mobile application to connect users with the art and historical markers in Nashville. This project was born from a hack night with Code for Nashville and utilizes Ionic, AngularJS, and Firebase.
Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. The only thing that matters is whether or not you know a little more than you did yesterday.
Delaine is now a software developer for a school where she writes primarily in PHP on a personalized learning platform. She also loves JavaScript and uses her free time to keep her skills fresh.
Learn more about Delaine in her profile.
Chris Barrett
Approaching 30 years old, Chris Barrett decided that he wanted to leave retail and have a career. As he explored the option of going back to college and completing his Bachelor’s degree, he kept hearing about Nashville Software School. After some encouragement from friends, Chris attended an info session and he was sold. “I really didn’t know exactly what I was getting into, but I was told that NSS was gaining a reputation for not only getting people into great jobs, but amazing careers.”
Attending our part-time bootcamp, as a part of Evening Cohort 3, while working full-time was not without challenges, however. “Being committed to something for a full year is difficult,” Chris stated. “Luckily, I had my friends who were already in the industry encouraging me to carry on and were living proof that it was actually worth it (side note, IT WAS).”
It always was (and still is) one of the best feelings when you’re pounding your head against the keyboard trying your DARNDEST to figure out a specific issues, and you FINALLY figure it out.
Chris used his experience as an Uber driver, who never knew where to hear live music (and out-of-town riders who insisted that he must know where to find something), as inspiration for this front-end capstone. He created an app called Local Noise which allows users to search for live music based on location and date, favorite the show, buy tickets, and get directions to the venue. He focused heavily on a simple UI, using the Materialize Framework as the basis and SASS to customize to a modern, sleek look. His app was built using the AngularJS framework and uses Firebase storage for his flat data structure with calls to the JamBase API for external data.
Chris now works for a SaaS company where he gets to marry his design background with his coding experience. Currently, he is helping to redesign their marketing website.
Learn more about Chris in his profile.
Be sure to listen to the graduates talk to our friend, Clark Buckner, about their journey into development and about their experience at NSS. And stay tuned for more Graduate Spotlights.
