Cleared For Takeoff | Graduate Spotlight

Cohort 19 students Willie Pruitt and Azim Sodikov were already learning software development before they attended NSS. Azim was teaching himself basic skills and Willie was pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Both wanted to increase their pace of learning and were ready to takeoff on their 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.

Azim Sodikov

After moving to the US, Azim was working in the restaurant industry, but always knew he wanted to become a software developer. In his free time, he taught himself basic web technologies. He was living in Nashville when he decided to learn development by attending a bootcamp and discovered Nashville Software School. He was drawn to the six month curriculum and appreciated that NSS is a nonprofit. He also spoke with some graduates who had good things to say about NSS’s teach methods.

Azim’s biggest roadblock during bootcamp was properly managing his work-life balance. The most valuable part of the NSS bootcamp experience was team work.

I had a chance to work on complex projects with different teams, and learned how to solve difficult problems with teamwork and collaboration, and deliver quality software.

If you’re considering a bootcamp, Azim believes it’s important that you have the motivation to learn. And if you’ve been accepted to a bootcamp, he recommends you complete your prework.

For his front-end capstone, Azim built an application called YouTube Coding. It allows developers to learn from a collection of video tutorials from YouTube and create their own video playlists. He built the application using HTML, CSS, SASS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, AngularJS, Firebase, and the YouTube API.

Azim’s back-end capstone is an e-commerce web application for a company called Bazar. It has the basic functionality of an e-commerce website and was built with C# on .NET Core, Razor templates, and SQL-server for the database.

Azim is currently strengthening his C# skills and diving deeper into object oriented programming.

Check out Azim’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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