All Good Things Must Come to An End…
Well, today was a bit of a heavy day. We learned this morning that The Iron Yard will be shutting its doors permanently after our current class ends. This is nationwide, not just the Dallas campus. The staff wasn’t able to give us all the reasons, we were just told that the board of The Iron Yard feels this is the best decision. Our class and career support will continue through October 13th. Our instructors, support staff, and campus director are an amazing team, and we as students feel very supported by them. Caitlin, the campus director, reassured us that she will continue to help out however she can with our job search following October 13th. The amount of investment and passion they put into The Iron Yard is unlike anything I think I would see at other coding schools.
We were given our weekly project yesterday afternoon. I wasn’t able to start on it until this morning, as I went to a NodeJS Meetup last night. Our assignment was to use the iTunes API to create a music player website, where you can search different artists and see results render to the page. From here you can preview song samples. I finished it around the time class started this morning, checking off all the “hard-mode” items. The design doesn’t look great right now, and I think it would be cool to add some additional features as well, so those might be added soon. If you want to see the site, go to https://austinchappell.github.io/week-four-project/, or see my GitHub repo at https://github.com/austinChappell/week-four-project.
We’re spending the latter part of this week doing supplemental front-end study. We’ve been learning about sprite images and canvas. I had messed around with canvas a little before attending TIY, but never with sprites. That’s been a pretty fun adventure. If you’re unfamiliar with sprites, it’s basically taking one image making up a grid of smaller images that you can use to create a stop-motion animation effect. I used a sprite image sheet of an archer, and another of a cat, to make a somewhat interesting animation. The genre of animation I chose doesn’t reflect my typical personality, but these seemed to be pretty good sprites to work with for my first animation. You can view it here https://austinchappell.github.io/cat-sprites/.
I’m going to go ahead and start the job-search a little more aggressively, even though we still have 12 weeks of instruction left. I’m feeling good about my front-end fundamentals, as I had a lot of practice in that area before I began The Iron Yard. I think I could handle most entry-level front-end developer jobs right now. I’m looking for jobs in Texas, but am open to the idea of relocating. There are a couple of out-of-state jobs I am going to apply for tonight.
Time to crack the books and continue self-study. Tonight I’m going to start learning ReactJS. I’m going to get a decent handle on both React and Java these next few weeks, so I can better decide which one would be a better fit for me to study at the end of the course.
