Learning a foreign language is pretty difficult. During my first few weeks at Tech Talent South, that’s how I felt about learning Ruby—especially when I had never really played around with coding or with the behind the scenes aspects of any technologies. I came in knowing next to nothing about how coding and web development worked.

I am now surprised at how much we have learned in just a couple of weeks. We are halfway through the full time program and while we are still learning new things everyday, I’m also using stuff we learned in the first week like an old pro.

Tech Talent South has been a huge leap for me. I decided a while back I wanted to get out of retail, as a friend of mine had been pushing me to learn web development for some time. Unfortunately, my friend doesn’t live locally and I didn’t have a foundation in technology. As I was trying to learn on my own, I started figuring out I wasn’t very motivated after a long day at work to learn something difficult. Every time I tried, I was hitting roadblocks and error messages I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand the answers I would find on the Internet either. So, I found Tech Talent South, talked to co-founder, Richard Simms, and found that it sounded like a program that would be very beneficial to my situation. I quit my job and dove right in.

The experience of building web applications from the ground up each week is great. Now, I have encountered coders and instructors that cannot only help me directly with an error, but also can walk me through the solutions we find together. I don’t feel alone in the process anymore; I’m in a classroom full of students that are having similar frustrations in learning a new programming language. I’m really excited to continue learning more during the second half of the program and hope to move on to a job or internship as a junior web developer.