Mandy Arola
Mandy has been following developers & tech companies at meetups since 2016. She is NSS’s chief content wrangler, a.k.a. marketing manager. When she’s not writing blogs, managing social media, pestering instructors & graduates for content, or attending meetups, you can find her traveling the world or at home with her beloved dog Lola.
We ask all of our students to blog weekly about what they’ve learned. This practice serves two purposes. First, it’s an easy way for students to start applying what they’ve learned week one. Second, when the learning gets tough, students can pause and reflect on how far they’ve come. We asked Cohort 21 student, Dr. Teresa Vasquez if we could share her blog and she graciously agreed. Throughout her blog Teresa shares the challenges she’s faced in an open, honest, and encouraging way.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
Learning
We spent the last two days hanging out at Nodevember meeting developers from around the country, catching up with alumni, and listening to a lot of great talks! A few of those talks came from our alumni. We heard from Delaine Wendling on D3, Matt Hamil on ReactVR (both from Cohort 15 which graduated this past January), and Aimee Knight from Cohort 4 gave a keynote on debugging stylesheets.
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Topics:
Alumni,
Community
Seth Dorris was an Army Captain prior to joining Cohort 10 at NSS. He’s now is a full-stack developer for Sierra Trading Post and the learning hasn't stopped...from databases such as PostgreSQL, SQLServer, MySQL, and MongoDB, to technologies such as Node.JS, ASP.NET, Angular and React. Seth offers advice on defining your career objectives and coding outside of work to grow your skills faster.
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Topics:
Alumni,
Student Stories
When a student considers attending NSS today, many of them spend a lot of time researching the school. They look at reviews on Course Report, read our blog, comb through every page of our website, and talk with our graduates. But five years ago, none of that existed...well we had a website with a few blogs that read more like social media updates than blog posts, but there were no reviews or graduates to talk to. In fact, even the idea of a coding bootcamp was still a new concept. So who were these early adopters that decided to take a chance on NSS as part of our very first cohort?
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Topics:
Alumni,
Student Stories
On Friday we graduated 21 new full stack Node.JS developers. This is our eighth class of software developers to graduate this year and wraps up our fifth anniversary year. Cohort 20 spent 6 months with instructor Joe Shepherd, who shared the class became like “siblings” and learned to work together despite their differences. Listen to their podcasts.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
Hiring?
You’ve heard of UX Designers, but do you know what they actually do? The title can be a bit misleading. While design plays a role, UX designers do so much more. Let's explore the six stages of UX design.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
UI/UX
Cohort 19 students Willie Pruitt and Azim Sodikov were already learning software development before they attended NSS. Azim was teaching himself basic skills and Willie was pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Both wanted to increase their pace of learning and were ready to takeoff on their bootcamp adventure. Hear about their journeys.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
Hiring?
In an article published on TechCrunch last year, Carson Miller discusses why
The Future Of Front-End Development Is Design. Building new digital products is easier and more affordable than ever, but you still have to build a product that users love...and therein lies the challenge. In today’s job market, code literacy is an essential skill for designers and managers, not just developers. It's also beneficial for front-end developers to understand user experience design. The demand for this hybrid role is growing quickly in Nashville, which is why we created our Front-End Web Designer/Developer Bootcamp.
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Topics:
Student Stories,
Learning,
UI/UX
Ryan Tanay was working in desktop support, small business IT, and networking before he attended NSS. After graduation, Ryan was a junior instructor for a year and now works in DevOps with the full-stack and learned all of his DevOps skills post NSS. Ryan shares about the importance of continual learning and networking.
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Topics:
Alumni,
Student Stories
On Saturday Nashville Software School and Tech Hill Commons was filled with energy from the Nashville tech community for BarCamp Nashville. The doors opened at 8am and the building quickly filled with eager learners. With sessions ranging from interviewing, to how to speak at BarCamp, to VR and AI, there was something for everyone.
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Topics:
Alumni,
Student Stories,
Community