A Love For Problem-Solving | Graduate Spotlight

Jun 6, 2019
Mandy Arola

Brittany Ramos-JanewayWhen Brittany Ramos-Janeway graduated from college, she wasn't sure what path she wanted to take, so she started working as a bartender and in an Amazon fulfillment center. While these jobs helped pay the bills, she was still looking for a career. She started pursuing law school, even taking the LSAT, but an idea for an app inspired her to start learning to code. Brittany began learning Python on her own an loved the problem-solving aspect of coding, but she quickly realized that if she were to pursue this as a career, she would need an in-person learning environment.

She considered returning to college to get a degree in computer science, but since a bootcamp allow her to get a job as a developer faster, she chose the vocational route.

The NSS Experience

Brittany loved the community at NSS. "From my classmates to the staff, I am thankful to everyone who helped me learn, and who have now become my professional network as I embark on this new journey," she said.

She did encounter some challenges along the way. "I think that development really is in some ways a long series of roadblocks. Part of the fun is figuring out how to overcome them," she shared. Brittany clearly loves problem-solving! Her biggest roadblock came at the beginning of the second half of the bootcamp when she began to learn C#. She took it slow and focused on understanding the basics before trying to digest something more complicated. She encourages students "seek to understand, but keep it relevant. If you are writing or copying code and you don't understand why it works, ask questions until you do. The caveat to that is when you are digging too deep. I think a good question to ask yourself is 'Do I know what the code is doing?' as long as the answer to that is 'yes' then I would suggest you move on."

Learning a programming language can be quite humbling.

Capstone Projects

With Javascript and React in her toolbox, Brittany decided to build the app that she had started before attending NSS. Many of her friends would tell her that they would vote, but they were not familiar with any of the candidates. Brittany herself also found it challenging to learn anything about the candidates that were running in her small town. Her app Battlebus, makes it easier for voters to keep track of their representatives. When a user registers for the app, they input their address and get a list of their local, state, and federal representatives. The user can save representatives and add notes and links to what they learned about their representatives. The app was built using ReactJS, HTML, CSS, Semantic UI, and the Google Civics API.

Brittany's book club inspired her back-end capstone. The club didn't have an organized way for members to recommend and select the next book, so they read several books that didn't meet their expectations. Her app Prosé allows users to sign up for their book club, see the current book their reading, and make suggestions to the group for the next selection. Members can also vote on the next book through the app. Prosé was built with C#, ASP.NET Core, Bootstrap, New York Times' Bestseller API, and Google Books API.

Hire Brittany!

Brittany would like to find a full stack or back-end development role as she enjoys working with data. While she's on the job hunt, Brittany is rebuilding Battlebus in C# and .NET.

Learn more about Brittany's experience at NSS and her capstones in her podcast and on GitHub.


Check out all of the recent grads on Cohort 29's class website and hear the graduates share their journey into development and their experience at NSS in their podcasts below.

Topics: Student Stories, Hiring?, Web Development