Wayne Collier has been interested in technology since he was young. By the age of fourteen, he was a licensed amateur radio operator. He learned about frequency allocations, the behaviors of frequency ranges, and why they were used for any given application. After a short career in the Marine Corps as an air traffic controller, Wayne had the opportunity to work on satellite communications for the Williamson County Ham Radio Club.
His interest in coding began while working for Waste Management where he was introduced to Post Scripting Language (PSL). He taught himself the basics and was able to create a lot of complex scripts for in-house use. Some of them functioned more like programs. He then started learning Python and C/C++ and eventually turned to Node.js and automation with IoT (internet of things) projects.
When Wayne decided to make a career transition into development, he turned to Nashville Software School (NSS) to formalize his training and experience.
Capstone Projects
For his front-end capstone, Wayne created a web app that controls an IBM Tello drone. The app is a simple, user-friendly way to control the drone without a phone or remote. Users can connect to the drone through wifi and then create routes to specific locations. The highlight of his experience at NSS was “seeing the little green light on the drone.” He explained, “I knew once that light went from red to green, that it was going to fly via the launch button from my app.” Colliers Autonomous was built with React, Node.js, and JavaScript.
The idea for his back-end capstone came from his frustration with open mat times at the gym where he practices Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu. By design, open mat times are unstructured, which means you never know who is going to show up. Will they be at your training level? Can they help you train on something particular? Can you help them?
With his app, Open Mat, users can find open mat times near them and sign up with their name, rank, affiliation, and competitor. This helps those attending see if there are other students they can train with at the open mat session. He built the app using React, C#/.NET, and JavaScript.
NSS Experience
The hardest part of his 12 months in Evening Cohort 8 was growing demands for his time during the last three months of the program. Fortunately, he was able to find a balance and complete his final capstone.
You don't get this time back. Put 100% into this and this will move you forward to where you want to be.
Hire Wayne!
Wayne is looking for his first job as a developer and is interested in SQL, Python, MongoDB, and Express.js. Learn more about Wayne on Linkedin.
Check out all the recent grads on Evening Cohort 8’s class website and hear the graduates from Cohorts Evening 8 and 31 share their journey into development and their experience at NSS in their podcasts below.
