Adam Smith was drawn to software development because he loves to learn. And being a developer requires you to learn something new all the time. As a part of Evening Cohort 6, Adam shared, “It's the greatest feeling looking back a year later and remembering where I started, how much I’ve learned, and the staggering amount I still have the opportunity to learn. It's great working really hard on a new topic and finally figuring it out and seeing it work. There is always something new.”
When asked why he chose Nashville Software School (NSS), he stated, “I chose NSS because it came with a solid reputation for teaching fundamentals and helping grads with that very important first job.”
Even when you love to learn, you can expect a few struggles along the way. For Adam, it was the beginning of back-end development. He pushed really hard during the six months of front-end development and even more so while working on his capstone. During the break between the front-end and back-end, he slowed down a little. And while the rest was good, it made getting back into the routine tough. Adding to the return of the routine was learning C# concepts. He shared, “I had to push myself outside of class to find other resources to figure out what was going on because I was getting it, but not as well as I knew I needed to.”
You are only going to get out of this what you put in. If you come in with some knowledge of programming, push yourself to learn more. If you come in with no knowledge, learn as much as you can in class and then push yourself a little more.
The idea for his front-end capstone came to him on a drive home from a family gathering in Chattanooga. Their family meets in Chattanooga regularly as it’s the halfway point between their homes. The family is always looking for a new location to meet, so he decided to create Meet Here. The app lets users enter two locations and the type of place they’d like to meet. It then calculates the midpoint and finds places nearby that meet the desired location type. The user can then view and share directions or save the meeting point if they create an account. The web app was built with AngularJS and Google APIs for mapping and locations. It saves the data in a NoSQL database.
Before Adam even started class, he knew what he wanted to build for his full stack application. He explained, “(Before NSS) I had done work in large distribution centers and have a project locally doing similar work. In looking for a warehouse management system (WMS) to meet my client's needs, I found systems that they could afford were severely limited in their functionality and the large systems I had worked with were way too robust and expensive.”
He created Small Shop Inventory, the first step in a full WMS for small organizations. The application allows businesses to track their inventory. The inventory module features real-time updating from Shopify via web hooks and a user-friendly client-side interface. Adam built the interface with ReactJS. C# provides the API and data access layer with the data being stored in SQL. The application is hosted on Microsoft Azure. Future versions will build on the inventory module to provide picking, packing, shipping, and reporting features.
Adam is wrapping up his consulting work while he searches for his first development job. In his spare time, he is working on Small Shop Inventory to make sure the inventory module is solid before adding features.
To learn more about Adam's capstones, visit his portfolio site.
Check out all of the recent grads on Evening 6's class website.
Hear the graduates talk to our friend, Clark Buckner, about their journey into development and about their experience at NSS.
