Motivational Joy | Graduate Spotlight

From the moment you meet Joy Ittycheriah, you’ll discover that he radiates joy and positivity. After two decades he still loved his job as a chemist but was tired of working the night shift and decided it was time for a change. He took a month off and several family members recommended he explore a career with computers. He started exploring the possibilities and discovered that he enjoyed the work. Joy shared “If I like something, I stick with it. Things have changed a lot [since I minored in computer science], including working as a team.”

As a part of Web Development Cohort 33, Joy followed in the footsteps of three family members who are Nashville Software School (NSS) graduates, including his daughter. After completing the bootcamp, Joy looks forward to technical conversations with his family. His favorite part about the bootcamp was the people, from his classmates to the instructors and the career development team. He was regularly challenged through “learning concepts at light speed.” 

Joy shared his four motivational tips for students:

1. Focus, focus, focus
2. Try, try, try
3. Never, ever give up!
4. Ask for help!

Capstone Projects

For his front-end capstone, Joy wanted to create an app to share motivation. His application, Motivation Joy, allows users to share motivational quotes, images, and ideas with each other, similar to a social network. He built the app with React and a JSON Server. He also connected the Eventbrite API to pull in events in Nashville for the next week. Users can add these events to their list of activities and share them with other users.

For his back-end capstone, Joy built an app for personal accountability following retrospectives. After a sprint, our teams meet with the instructors and discuss what they would like to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. But after that meeting, there is no follow up on the next sprint about their previous start/stop/continue list. TeamDream is a personal accountability app that allows the user to keep track of their start/stop/continue lists for each sprint and create an action plan. Joy used Django to create the app, built ERDs with dbdiagram.io, and used Moqups to create his wireframes. 

Hire Joy!

Joy is working on code challenges to keep his skills fresh during his job search. He loves working with others and would prefer working in a team environment. Learn more about Joy in his podcast or on his website or GitHub.

Check out all the recent grads on Cohort 33’s class website and hear the graduates share their journey into development and their experience at NSS in their podcasts below.