Marco was already working as a cloud automation engineer/DevOps, but found that he needed additional skills to meet the changing industry. “I wanted to keep adding to my skill set to keep me employable. The industry is moving to a point where you can no longer be an Operations person or Developer person,” Marco explained. He first heard about Nashville Software School when he was working at LeanKit.
Marco joined Web Development Evening Cohort 8. His favorite part of going through the program was “meeting all of the great folks in my class and learning their story.” He shared, “I have been in the IT space for over 20 years and this was scary for me. I can only imagine what was going through [the minds of] some of my classmates that have little to no exposure to this industry. [I was] very proud and humbled to get to know them.”
Capstone Projects
For his front-end capstone, Marco wanted to help fellow RPG (role-playing game) fans connect with each other. His app, Dice Or No Dice, allows gamers to post campaigns that need players. Players can see what’s available and join a campaign. The app was built with ReactJS, Bing Location Search, MapBox Maps and Forward/Reverse Geolocation, and Firebase for the Authentication and Database.
Marco was looking to challenge himself for his back-end capstone but keep it fun. He decided to create an app that facilitates the management of combat scenarios in tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. DM Insights allows players to manage their characters and campaigns. The Dungeon Master (DM) view helps DMs track initiative and see basic player stats. DM Insights was built with ReactJS, ASP.NET Core 3.0 Preview (SignalR auto-reconnect), SignalR, Okta (OIDC & oAuth), and SQL Server.
Hired!
Marco recently accepted a job that combines his DevOps and development skills. He’s looking forward to continuing to learn new technology and programming languages. In his free time, he is adding new features to DM Insights to use with his friends.
Learn more about Marco on his website.
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.
