Cleared For Takeoff | Graduate Spotlight

Cohort 19 student Willie Pruitt was already pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, but he wanted to increase the pace of his learning and was ready to takeoff on his bootcamp adventure.

Willie Pruitt

Willie Pruitt was an air traffic controller in the Air Force. After finishing his service, Willie wanted to move away from his hometown in Louisiana and he settled on Nashville. He was having coffee at Frothy Monkey when he came across an ad for a coding bootcamp. He was already studying computer science for his Bachelor’s degree and decided to look into bootcamps as a way to get himself career ready. During his research he came across Nashville Software School. After learning more about the program and hearing that we are one of the few bootcamps to accept the GI Bill^®, Willie was sold.

NSS seemed like the perfect fit for my styling of learning. It offered me an environment to focus on a specific set of skills to learn and refine.

His interest in software development evolved from his love of gaming. His biggest roadblock during bootcamp was time management, a common roadblock among students. But the sense of accomplishment when all of your hard work manifests itself in a working application is worth the struggles. Willie’s advice to new students? “Ask questions early and often.”

For his front-end capstone, Willie built an application called Story Seeds, inspired by his love of creative writing. It’s a crowd sourced creative writing app that allows you to branch your story off of other stories. He described it as the “Git Hub of creative writing.” He built the app with Angular.JS, Bootstrap, Firebase, and JavaScript. He plans to re-write it in ASP.NET, MVC environment.

Willie’s back-end capstone is called ATCScheduler. It is an application to streamline the creation and restructuring of air traffic control (ATC) schedules. It fits the specific needs of controllers’ medical clearances, skill levels, and position certifications that can make scheduling difficult. The app was built in Visual Studio using .NETCore, ASP, and EntityFramework. Willie plans to add a few more features before sending it to a few former colleagues to test.

Willie wants to continue learning other languages and frameworks and enjoys manipulating data to get your desired results. Currently, he is tweaking his front-end capstone.

Listen to Willie’s interview with Clark Buckner about his journey and check out Willie’s profile on GitHub.

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 Cohort 19’s class website.

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