This week we met with Dan Certa, a cohort 21 graduate. He created a capstone that make life a little easier for busy parents.
Dan Certa
Dan Certa was a recording engineer and music producer and wanted to apply his experience in client-facing technical roles to a new field. His wife, who works with developers, suggested he give web development a try. Dan has always enjoyed making things work and has found that web development feeds that motivation. When exploring his options for bootcamp, Dan liked the comprehensive six-month curriculum and appreciated that NSS is a nonprofit.
There were a few roadblocks along the way, including one that was self-imposed.
It took a lot of effort to become comfortable asking questions and admitting I didn't understand something. Coming from a career where I typically had all the answers, embracing a beginner's mindset was a challenge.
Learning to ask questions is an important part of our bootcamp experience and it directly correlates to Dan’s favorite part of the program…the people. He explained, “Being ‘in it together’ with great people (classmates and instructors} helped mitigate the inevitable frustrations.” He also encouraged students to “have fun with it! It’s just software.”
Dan’s capstones centered on his role as a parent and making things easier for busy parents. His front-end capstone, called TemperTracker, facilitates the collection, analysis, and visualization of behavioral data for both parents and behavior therapists. Dan shared, “I set out to create an intuitive, easy-to-use app for parents who need to track their child’s challenging behavior. If a child’s tantrums are of a frequency and/or severity to the point of impacting a family’s quality of life, a behavioral therapist will ask parents to track a child’s tantrums over a period of time. This data can assist therapists and parents in devising strategies to prevent these behaviors.” The app is built with Bootstrap 4, AngularJS, ChartJS, and Firebase.
For his back-end capstone, Dan created an organization app called Kid Stuff that uses Optical Character Recognition to store all of the papers that come home from your child’s school, including their art, homework, class notes, and extra curricular activities. Parents simply take a picture of the art, homework, or note with the camera on their phone. The app reads the images using OCR and makes them searchable. Parents can then save events to iCal and email documents as PDFs. Kid Stuff is built with Ruby 2.4.2, Rails 5.1.4, Bootstrap, PostgreSQL, AWS s3, OCR Space API, iCalendar, Paperclip and ImageMagick.
Dan recently accepted a position as a junior web developer for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He has also started to explore Functional Programming, Haskell in particular. He shared, “it’s a fascinating and very different way of manipulating data than OOP.”
Listen to Dan’s interview with Clark Buckner about his NSS journey and check out his portfolio site.
