Time flies. It is already the beginning of the sixth week at Tech Talent South. I have learned a lot in the previous five weeks: HTML, CSS, jQuery and most of all, Ruby on Rails. We have built different webpages and apps, following the lead of our instructor, Ben, who really gave us hands-on experience, a deeper understanding of class contents, and prepared us with a nice portfolio for job seeking. Besides the coursework, I am excited about all the skills I’ve acquired so far and have already ventured into building something on my own. Using HTML, CSS, the Materialize framwork, and jQuery, I built my personal website (http://darktef.github.io/). I was thrilled that I could build my own website after just 3 weeks of learning. I could not believe it when it was completed. Thanks to our brilliant instructor Ben and awesome community organizer Emily, without them, I would not have reached this far in my learning.
At the end of fifth week, we teamed up and were ready for our final project – building a complex and interesting Rails application! Thinking about all kinds of fancy features our application will have and the problem it is going to solve, I could not wait for the final demo day to showcase our application to the community.
During the past five weeks we have worked so hard, absorbing new knowledge like sponges. A typical class day is made up of a reviewing previous homework assignments, new course contents, a guest speaker and the office hours. The review on homework really helps to clarify the general problems we have and deepen our understanding of the previous subject.
In my opinion, the guest speakers are the shining point of TTS program. They provide valuable insight to web developer’s world. They give targeted advice for newbie coders like us. To hear what they are actually doing in the industry, to ask about their experience and get advice, to be inspired by their great minds; all of this really helps us grind through the program with confidence.
Our instructor is super knowledgeable and helpful with all of the seemingly dumb questions we have. We can always reach out to him during office hours. He is super patient on walking us through the questions/problems in detail. In that way, we actually know what is happening behind lines of codes, and we know how to deal with it when similar problems arise again.
Our Community Organizer is always there to help us with job seeking. She helps us with our resumes, cover letters and posts tons of events/meetups/jobs available in the area. She values networking and encourages students to take advantage of these awesome events in town to learn but also to network with people in the industry.
It has been a fulling journey so far. We only have three more weeks to go, and I’m already starting to miss it.
