My time at Tech Talent South has been great. Even though I am an experienced programmer TTS has given me the opportunity to learn more about other languages and focus on using best practices. Most importantly it gave me an outlet to focus on learning.
Now let me introduce myself, I am Riley Childs a 17-year old High School Senior who is interested in all things technology. I have a deep interest in enterprise technology and IT, in fact I hold a CCENT certification from Cisco. I have spent many years honing my programing skills with a focus on PHP. Over the past several years I have gained many different skills in by teaching myself, but over the past several months I have lacked a challenge, Tech Talent South gave me that challenge.
My journey to class began the Thursday before the first day of class, Ricky Singh (a teacher and mentor) introduced me to Abigail. Shortly after that I filled out an online application and not even 2 hours later I got a call Richard Simms from the Atlanta Location. Richard quickly conferred with his partner, Betsy, and Saturday morning I heard the best new I heard in months, there was a spot for me in the Charlotte Part-Time Class.
The first week of class we hit the ground running, learning about the programing basics. The second week brought us Classes and Objects in Ruby, by this time we had all written a basic Rock Paper Scissors game using Ruby that is played at the command line (which you can take a look at here: http://git.io/jkuBhg). The next week, this fast paced class quickly brought us up to speed on the facets of the Ruby on Rails Framework, teaching us how to quickly create a basic pizza shop app to manage “orders”. Then we paused to focus on one of the most important aspects of programing, Git. We learned about version control and how to use it keep all the different versions of the files in our app. We learned about linking data and how to create relationships between different tables in a database (something that can be applied beyond Rails). We quickly moved on to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and how to use those to style our websites and how to use CSS Frameworks like Bootstrap to make styling our web apps much easier. Scott, one of the instructors, even explained how Docker, a containerized approach to deploying your code on the web, works during office hours (a complex concept that I have been struggling to grasp for several months now.)
Overall my time at TTS has been incredibly valuable and I highly recommend it to anyone that needs to expand their programing know-how or those that have never even touched a line of code. I don’t think I would ever be able to thank Betsy, Abby, Scott, and Zack enough for this amazing opportunity.
Happy Coding!
//Riley
