Learning to code is a journey. Let me first acknowledge that I am nowhere near the end of that journey, and I that is a good thing because learning to code is a process, not a means to an end. Looking back, everything that I have learned at TTS over the past 8-weeks is amazing and I am beyond thankful for the opportunity. Last night I was going over my own personal notes from the first week and it feels great to be able to see where I was then and where I am now. Over the course of this class I have built over 30 apps, learned git, github, Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and even a few things that weren’t on the lesson plan such as Testing.
Of all the cool things that we did during class, my favorite and most rewarding would definitely be our final project that two classmates and I completed during the final weeks. We were told to make an app using the things we had learned in class; no guidelines. While brainstorming we decided our favorite thing about class was working with APIs, so we looked around the web and found some we liked. We eventually choose a weather API and an event API. Two weeks of wrestling with our code we created Drink Weather, a silly web app that takes a user’s current location and returns the current weather, an adult beverage recommendation based on that weather, and also an activity according to weather and location. Working from scratch really helped cement what we had learned throughout class and the all the mistakes that were made during our creation of Drink Weather made us better coders now. I know it’s not perfect, but we all took pride in the creation of Drink Weather.
As I have mentioned before, networking is key in any industry but will prove to be essential whenever breaking into a new one. Tech Talent South has helped make introductions to influential leaders in the local community such as Anthony Catanese and Spencer Pitman. I have also joined new meetups, picked the brains of guest speakers, and even volunteered as a guest instructor for a kids coding class. The experience has been amazing and I cannot wait to begin to apply the things that I have learned here to the new world.
