Many of our graduates come to NSS to change their careers. When they start their first job as a junior software developer, not only do they bring problem-solving and coding skills, they also bring their prior work experiences with them. Jared Fuller and Jesse Waddell both come from customer-focused careers. Their experiences in serving customers’ needs will help them work with both clients and end-users as developers.
Jared Fuller
Before NSS, Jared was working in advanced technical support and fraud prevention for a television company. He loved helping people and fixing things but didn’t see a long career path. A college friend who had attended NSS and was now a software developer suggested he give development a try. Jared liked it and moved to Nashville to join Cohort 17.
Jared’s favorite part of his experience at NSS was the people he met. When he moved to Nashville, he only knew a handful of people. Jared shared, “By the end of the six months here at NSS, I feel like our cohort had developed into this crazy, wacky, family of sort with everything we’d been through together.”
Jared’s biggest roadblock during the program was himself. He realized that he could have put more energy and focus into the first half of the bootcamp, so he stepped it up for the last half of the program. Jared grew a lot during this time and in addition to learning Node, he learned React outside of class and used it in his back-end capstone.
Trust the process, enjoy every moment, give it your all and if you become a regular to Red Bicycle, they will treat you very well - and get the Cuban there.
When it came time to decide on his capstones, Jared built applications that showcased his two biggest passions, outside of coding of course.
For his front-end capstone, Jared built a web app called The Clubhouse. Every morning he checks several websites for baseball news, so he created an app that combines and filters those news sources. The user can view and filter the latest baseball news from three sources for their favorite baseball team. It was built with Angular, Firebase, jQuery, and Lodash.
Jared’s back-end capstone is a mobile app called NashHistory. It shows every historical marker in Nashville and lets you plan a trip to visit each site with navigation from Apple Maps. The user can also take notes and photos of what they learn or see. The app was built with React Native and Node, and utilizes Nashville’s open data for historical marker records and Amazon S3 for photo storage.
In his free time, Jared is currently working on projects to get more familiar with React and Redux.
Listen to Jared’s interview with Clark Buckner about his journey and check out Jared’s profile.
Jesse Waddell
Jesse was working as an assistant manager at a grocery retailer. He was already interested in software development when someone suggested he try some free courses. He enjoyed those courses and a couple friends who had attended NSS recommended he apply.
As a part of Cohort 17, Jesse enjoyed the pressure of the program, the group collaboration, the helpfulness of the instructors, and making new friends. While he did encounter a few roadblocks, his instructors and fellow students always helped him realized that he could overcome each obstacle.
Jesse’s advice for future students?
Stay confident, trust the system, and ask questions.
For his front-end capstone, Jesse built an app called Gamesole which keeps track of where you left off on your video game. You can also search for games and leave comments. The app was built with AngularJS, Angular-Material, and Firebase.
Jesse’s back-end capstone is called Whim. The app finds the most popular things on reddit and brings them back to you to save on your personal page. It was built with AngularJS, Mongoose, Express, and Bootstrap. Jesse loved seeing the back-end and front-end of his application working together.
Currently, Jesse is learning new frameworks and finishing stretch goals from his capstone projects.
Listen to Jesse’s interview with Clark Buckner about his journey and check out Jesse’s profile.
Be sure to listen to all of the graduates talk to our friend, Clark Buckner, about their journey into development and about their experience at NSS.
Check out all of the recent grads on the Cohort 17 class website.
