Davis Lindell moved to Nashville from Louisville, KY, and was making good money as a bartender. However, it wasn’t all about the money for Davis - he started to realize that bartending wouldn’t be a sustainable career with the long nights and weekends. “After a coworker of mine at the restaurant went through Nashville Software School (NSS) and showed me some of the stuff he was working on, I thought it was so cool,” he exclaimed. “I was inspired to take the leap into the development world.”
I've always had an interest in software development and computers in general going back to high school, I even did some rudimentary coding on MySpace back in the day when it was all the rage.
Originally enrolled in Part-time Evening Cohort 11, Davis was able to transition to the full-time Web Development Cohort 40 after being laid off in March due to the pandemic. “I was given the freedom to move to the day class for the back-end portion of the program and finish more quickly,” he explains. “Kind of a silver lining to this crazy world we live in now.”
Davis speaks fondly of the time he spent in both Part-time Evening Cohort 11 and Full-time Cohort 40, sharing that his “fellow students, instructors (albeit some only virtually) and being brought into this amazing community of people all dedicated to learning and growing together” was his favorite part of NSS.
Having tried online classes when he was in college, Davis was hesitant to transition to fully remote learning when the pandemic hit. “However, in the end, I think the transition was handled so smoothly that all my fears about moving online quickly dissipated and may have led to a better learning experience overall in the long run,” he shares.
Stick with it and trust the process. This stuff is HARD. Take solace in the small victories.
HousePlant-Topia is Davis’ front-end capstone project that he built to help keep track of when to water different houseplants. Davis created a proxy server that incorporates the text app Twilio, which will text you when you need to water each plant and what room it is in in your house. “So that way, when your mom comes to visit, the plant she gave you isn’t sitting dead, in the corner when she’s sleeping in your room,” he laughs. Davis built HousePlant-Topia using JavaScript ES6, React.js, Node.js, Heroku, Twilio, Firebase, and ReactStrap.
For his back-end capstone, Davis built an app for the fictional company “Don’t Park Unhappy,” a reference to various metered parking lots around Nashville. Don’t Park Unhappy has a customer view and an admin view. Customers are able to reserve spots in the company’s parking lot while admins can add, view, delete and edit the company’s parking lots and spots as needed. “Admins can also view all active and expired reservations, making it easy to tell who needs to be booted or towed if customers have not vacated their spot before their reserved time has expired,” he adds. Davis used Django to authenticate users’ registration/login credentials safely. To build Don't Park UnHappy, he used Django ORM, SQL, and Bootstrap.
While searching for his first job as a junior web developer, Davis has been taking an Amazon Web Services course to continue building on the skills he acquired at NSS! Davis doesn’t have a preference over back-end or front-end and shares that he would enjoy working in either or as a full stack developer.
Learn more about Davis by visiting his website or listening to his podcast!
Check out all the recent grads at Web Development Cohort 40's class website and hear the graduates share their experience at NSS and capstone projects in their podcasts below.