Leo Taylor had recently moved back to Nashville to be closer to his family. Prior to the move, he had been a plant manager at a hardwood flooring manufacturer and knew he wanted more challenge in his next career. While considering what was next, he took on the role of stay-at-home dad. He discussed options with his friends and shared his desire for a career where he could keep learning and be challenged. One of his friends suggested web development, so Leo started exploring coding on Codecademy and Team Treehouse.

While online learning platforms gave Leo a taste of coding, he wanted to learn in a structured, hands-on learning environment. Nashville Software School’s (NSS) part-time program gave him the learning environment he needed, the opportunity to ask questions, and help other students, all while continuing to be a stay-at-home dad during the day.

For his front-end capstone, Leo wanted a better solution for choosing fantasy football picks. He usually created elaborate spreadsheets to track all of the player information and thought it would be fun to create an app to handle the data instead. To build Draft Helper he used React, Fantasy Football Nerd API, Sass, Firebase, and Axios.

As a student in Evening Cohort 7, Leo’s favorite part of the bootcamp was watching everything he learned during the year come together in his final capstone project.

It was the coolest feeling to create a database and an API that I could use while developing a web app using the React framework.

His final capstone is a website for his friends’ music festival, Ayerwaves Music Festival, that is moving to Nashville. Leo built a website with an admin page that allows his friends to add artists and vendors via simple input forms. He described his process and tools, “I created a database with a SQL server management studio, then created a restful API with C#/.NET, and then hosted the database and API on Azure. Next I created a React app that made Axios calls to my API.”

His advice for future students? “Ask questions and don’t be afraid to break things.”

While Leo searches for his first development job, he is adding features to his capstone projects and learning with Katas, Codecademy, and Team Treehouse.

Learn more about Leo on his website.

Check out all of the recent grads on Evening Cohort 7's class website.

Hear the graduates share their journey into development and their experience at NSS.