I worked as a field technician out of New Orleans and have been working to complete my graduate studies in IT Management. Although I have been working in the IT field, it has been a decade plus since I did any actual coding. I was not in touch with modern web development. Thus, I decided to join a coding boot-camp in order to gain knowledge and the required technical skillset to enable me to understand and develop web-based applications.

I did some research and talked to colleagues, and all recommendations and information I was able to gather pointed to Tech Talent South (TTS). TTS is the only south-based coding boot-camp that has presence in the greater New Orleans area and other cities in the US. Furthermore, the syllabus was attractive and includes part-time option that was perfect for me, enabling me to continue to perform my work, attend my graduate studies while attending the boot-camp. I decided to join TTS Code Immersion part-time program with generous partial scholarship.

I successfully completed the Code Immersion boot-camp program in Fall 2018. The program was intense but well guided with sufficient hands-on experience that has enabled me to gain valuable knowledge and a skill set in modern web development using HTML5, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and SQL-records. The take-home assignments are challenging and the program requires ample amount of extra time to read, practice and practice and practice.  I quote one of my classmates describe it as “…hard but real experience.”  In addition, to the technical skills gained one of the major takeaways of the program is the introduction to the vivid methodological thinking culture of software development.

The program at TTS included a volunteer “Kids Code” program that I participated in order to train kids to code at a public library. I was surprised by the kid’s positive reception of the program and their creativity to tweak some of the example game code to their context, in fact the kids were very fast to resemble the application of IT to their environment much faster than some of the adults that I know. When the kids were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up most of them wanted to be a doctor and some engineers, I was surprised none said an IT or software developer but then, that is the main reason we are doing the kids coding program by TTS. Volunteering to the kids coding program has helped me achieve a sense of satisfaction and to give back to the community the knowledge and skillsets I gained in order to inspire and expose kids to the wonderful areas of IT and software development. The only challenge was the lack of more time to cover all topic for the kids in a manner that assimilates to the kids.

Furthermore, TTS organized numerous events that includes tech company tours, guest speakers and coding coffee meetups. These events help reveal real world experience of application of information technology and businesses built around innovative ideas. Some of the events included cutting edge areas of 3D scanning and printing, gaming application, the use of artificial intelligence for data mining in the oil industry and, subject areas such as; agile-scrum software development and IT talent search experts and carrier path advice. These events helped me a bunch in terms of exposure to practical application of IT and software development, networking and, in general expanded my horizon.

Actually, I was able to land a great job at a tech company giant in New Orleans as part of the talent matching opportunities by TTS.  Overall, I value the knowledge, technical skills and connections I have made in the TTS program. What is next for me is to continue to build my career and technical skills in software development and various areas of IT in order to get better opportunities and be able to create solutions preferably for socio-economic benefits and help organizations in digital transformation.