The Iron Yard | Stories

Bob Holben, a student in our Atlanta Front End Engineering program, recently wrote a great reflection after being in the program for two weeks. 

While week one felt a little bit about going away to summer camp, week two is where a little bit of fatigue settled in. It’s going to be a long burn, and I can’t wait to get to the end and reflect on how far this process has taken me and my classmates.

Each day except for Friday consists of lectures in the morning and lab (exercises) in the afternoon/evening. On Fridays, we have lab all day.

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The Iron Yard does a real good job. It’s not just about head-down coding. They make a point to foster a sense of community and create activities that don’t involve a keyboard. This week, we had sessions about personal brand building, design inspiration, and of course there was Friday Iron Pints.

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It’s moving pretty darn fast (and I’m glad for that). Before this week, I was under the impression that map/reduce/filter are programming concepts that are intermediate level. Not here. We learned about the forEach loop and an hour later, we embarked on our Thursday night homework that included exercises with map, reduce, and filter.

The train has left the station…

Jason Finchman, a student at our Atlanta campus, wrote a great post describing his first week in class.

I am now 7 full days into the class and although I don’t understand everything the first time I go through it, I have realized, with the help of the amazing instructors here, that it is all about my attitude and putting in the effort.

I can honestly say that so far this has been the hardest academic endeavor I have ever pursued in my life. The upside to this is not only the promise of a good job in a field that I am sure won’t be going away, but also the satisfaction of working on and figuring out the technological “puzzle” that is coding.

I hope that I will have the time to update this as I go through this class and I hope that any prospective students gain confidence to start down a path similar to mine.

Charleston student Matthew Gallo wrote a great post about what Day 1 is like at The Iron Yard. Hint: you dive right into writing code.

Today was a pretty awesome day. Nick, our Ruby instructor, made sure we had everything set up and ready to go this morning. And we didn’t wait around for anything to start coding away. I found his teaching style to be really easy to follow, we were following along right with his steps in the text-editor and/or the terminal.

So we learned about variable, defining variables, and calling methods to those variables. The homework , which was actually pretty fun, was learning 5 new methods and to call those methods on the following variables: strings, fixnums, floats, and booleans. It was cool to see how my examples from the first interval evolved and the different types of things I was doing by the time I got to the last variable.

Anyway, day one of class at the Iron Yard…CHECK! Looking forward to the challenges ahead of me!

This is a great story from Julie Torres, aka "Rails Mama", a graduate of our Atlanta Rails program.

I’ve been promising to recap my job search, so here it goes:

It’s no secret that I was not the strongest coder in my class. Several of the students came in with prior coding experience, and others came in with years of experience working in the tech field, or with degrees in Computer Science or Math.

I also had restrictions on the jobs that I could accept. With a family, I could not accept a job at a start-up that didn’t offer benefits or expected me to work 80 hours per week. I also couldn’t accept a low-paying job in order to get my foot in the door, since I already had a decent job and couldn’t afford to lose income.

For those reasons, I suspected that I might be one of the last to find work. I thought it might take 4-6 months to find a job that fit my needs.

The reality was quite the opposite of my expectations:

Within 1 month of graduation, I had interviewed with 4 companies, had an offer pending with 2 of them, and had received an excellent offer from the third–my ideal employer.

This is a story from Tafiq Momin, a recent graduate of our Houston Front End Engineering program. 

After these 12 weeks, I feel like I can do so many things with what I’ve learned. I think the biggest takeaway for me from this was not just HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but the fact that I learned how to learn about these languages. I can now apply that to other frameworks, libraries, and programming languages that I want to pursue learning in the future. When I think about the way to approach things now, it’s so very different from when I started. The one thing I think I regret not doing more of is blogging about it. I have so much more to say about each individual project or lesson that I learned, and I will continue to blog more about it. But I kind of wanted to give an overview of what I went through over the last 3 months and what I gained from it.

I don’t want to forget to mention all the guest speakers we’ve had throughout this whole 12 weeks. Entrepreneurs, software developers, designers, and even people with an ambition to start up a company have all taken time out to come talk to us. All of the advice, information, and knowledge presented at these talks have really helped me in so many ways. I can’t thank all of them enough for it.

I also want to say how much respect and admiration I have for everyone at the Iron Yard. From Matt to Jesse to Brian to all of my classmates, they all helped me and continue to help me in so many ways to help me succeed. Everyone has everyone’s back. It’s like a family. I don’t think you can find another culture like that elsewhere, especially not in school. That’s the kind of culture you need if you want to succeed in a course like this because there will be times where it gets tough and you start questioning whether you can even finish or why you even took the course. To have a great instructor who goes above and beyond to make sure that you have the tools and necessary information to get through everything is invaluable, and that’s what I feel like I had and continue to have with the Iron Yard.

This is a post from Peter Ortiz about taking the leap and joining The Iron Yard.

It took me until I was in my 30’s to realize I’ve lived my life far too passively. I was 31 years old, married, with 3 kids. I had a good job, but no passion for what I was doing. I was living pay check to pay check and most of the money I earned went towards bills. This was not the life I had envisioned for myself and my family. I realized that if I didn’t change my life, I was going to continue on this cycle. I always had an interest in computers and technology, so my plan was to learn the skills needed to start a new career as a software developer.

I thought I would teach myself how to code, but soon after trying to learn on my own, I found out this was gonna be a lot harder than I anticipated. Luckily, while searching the internet for information I came across an ad for The Iron Yard Academy. They offer intensive, three-month programming courses and help you get a job offer once you graduate. I did a ton of research and reached out to a few graduates. Everyone had nothing but great things to say about the program and said it was the best decision they ever made. So I decided to apply and after going through a few interviews, I got accepted to their Ruby on Rails course that starts in January!

This story is from Kevin Christmas, a graduate of our Houston Rails program.

After months figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and career, I came across a decision that has changed my life. I  enrolled into The Iron Yard, a three-month program that gives you all the tools necessary to create, innovate and change people’s lives. I have now started my fourth business which combines all my passions.

Thanks to the Iron Yard and Jesse [Houston Rails Instructor] for giving me all the skills necessary to take chances in life. I now posses the power and knowledge at my finger tips to start a business that I have a passion for. I can now make my vision a reality.

I feel so privileged to be at this place in my life. I feel so blessed to have had this experience. In a way, being able to be employed as a software developer is the least important aspect of this journey. The best part has been the person that I have become in the process. I believe in myself more, and I participate in life more, and I can see so much opportunity that before was invisible to me. I feel like I am crafting my kind of life, where I can do the things that I love, and make a living doing it. I plan to do that by getting more women like me involved, and helping to teach more people to code. How many ways can you say your grateful? I feel like I may never stop.

In many ways I hate to see this part of my life end, but I am so looking forward to where I go from here. I have a feeling that instead of an ending, I am experiencing and expansion, and that somehow all of this will just keep growing and changing. I hope that we all stay connected along the way, cause I already miss these guys so much.

Students at The Iron Yard come from all walks of life. Some have multiple degrees and years of experience in a career; others come straight from high school or college. Some move from across the country to invest 3 intense months in learning to program. They have different aspirations for where they'd like to be after they complete the program. But what they all have in common is a hunger to learn, a dedication to changing their life's trajectory, and a commitment to sticking it out when the going gets tough.

Whether you're just beginning to consider pursuing a career in programming or have applied and been accepted, these graduates' blog posts that encapsulate the experience will help you get a sense of what to expect at The Iron Yard.

What's "the programming type?" Emory Griffith breaks it down: "It’s someone who is resilient, likes to solve problems and and wants to create awesome stuff.

The Iron Yard is the beginning of a lifelong journey. Lance Putnam acknowledges how difficult it is, but also how excited he is about the future: "There is still so much left to learn, and this will be a field where there is always something new to be taught, but I am confident as to how I will one day be able to be a creator and developer for startups and companies, and one day, my own business."

Our small class sizes allow for a lot of collaboration and one-on-one attention. Robert Hitt appreciates the support from his classmates as he pushes through long days of writing code: "I have a great group of people around me, constantly pushing me to achieve things I didn’t think possible and then pushing me a little bit further." 

Even if you've been learning to code on your own, there's something special that happens when you commit full-time to the effort. Andrew House noticed a change in his mentality throughout his course: "I am so glad that I am coding. It truly was a life altering choice to come to The Iron Yard."

Matt Hartley looks back on his journey, now that he has his dream job, and knows he made the right choice: "I worried more that day about what kind of example I would become to them if I didn’t act with courage, step out into the unknown and embrace a better life for us all."

Find out more or apply for a course on the Academy page of our website!

By Laura Lindeman, Assistant Campus Director & Content Editor

Matt Bertino was tired of working for someone else.

His desire to build something from scratch to launch ideas of his own is what propelled him to take the Front End Engineering course at The Iron Yard. His passion for learning and building prototypes for clients has kept him around. Matt currently works at The Iron Yard’s Digital Health Accelerator in as the Developer in Residence.

With his background in finance and economics, including four years’ experience as a business analyst for a large company, Matt knew he had the skills to run a business. What he didn’t have was the technical ability to launch an application as a prototype. During his time at The Iron Yard, Matt learned the ins and outs of front end engineering, and how to think like a software engineer. He regularly worked 90 hour weeks, sticking around his classroom to go over questions with his instructor, chipping away at JavaScript code and building out real-world applications. And then he would go home and eat and do it all over again the next day.

It was great! It was very stressful but it was very good. I’ve gotten everything out of it that I wanted to get out of it and then some, and the people have been so great to me.

Matt’s final project was a product for travel sports teams to track their players, manage tryouts, and contact parents and players. He achieved his goal of building out a project that would allow clients to see and interact with their idea. Since completing the course, Matt has begun adding Ruby on Rails and node.js backend technologies to his repertoire:

I’ve been learning the backend as well, learning Rails and Node.js on the side for serve-side languages. And hopefully when that’s all settled, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be settled on learning that, but if I am I may jump into the mobile, but I think I’m focused on the web for now.

Matt says that The Iron Yard gave him the foundation he needed to be a lifelong learner and adapt to changing technology.

The Iron Yard - Atlanta recently held an internal hackathon for its students. They worked on small teams consisting of developers from each of the three classes - Rails, Mobile, and Front End Engineering. They got to experience building out a project from conception to prototype while working with developers using a different language from theirs! Rails Engineering student Andrew House posted these thoughts after the weekend:

Being on a team like that was worth the whole weekend to me. To be around minds who also had a thirst for knowledge and had a different perspective on everything. I look at things very logically, they had a much better perspective on design and user experience. I had a great team and more importantly had an absolute blast.

If you've wondered whether you're the "programming type," read on to hear what Atlanta Front End Engineering student Emory has discovered.

I’m learning that the “programming type” isn’t just someone who is naturally good at programming a computer.  I don’t know if anyone can be naturally good at that.  Instead, it’s someone who is resilient, likes to solve problems and and wants to create awesome stuff.  I can dig that. I’m learning that moving a little box 4 inches across a screen can sometimes take 3 hours and 2 cups of coffee.  I’m learning that a few people can approach a problem in different ways, and all be right or all be wrong.  I’m learning that failure is just a way to find out which strategies don’t work.

Students enter their cohorts at The Iron Yard coming from a diverse array of backgrounds, with a range of experience level with code. Everyone is here for their own reasons and with their own goals. But Andrew House, a Ruby on Rails student in Atlanta, hits the nail on the head with his evaluation of the value of lifelong learning.

The reason I’m at The Iron Yard is because I don’t have all the skills required to be a proficient Junior Rails Developer at my current level. That’s why I’m going to use the time that I have here to master any skills that I’m not good at. Testing is currently at the top of my list. Once I get it down (and I will get it down) I’ll move on to the next beast. Keep knocking them down one after another until I feel confident doing what I’m doing. Then when I’m confident, look at some amazing code that I don’t understand and begin the journey again. Learning is an ongoing process and it’s something that is needed by a web engineer. To be able to continuously challenge myself and push into the next technology. Adapting, evolving, and challenging. Three things that I love to do and will continue to do for as long as I can. Coding is fun. Always changing and never perfect.

Atlanta Ruby on Rails student Julie is a proud mom and a proud coder with some thoughts on opening the doors to technology a little wider for women.

The human brain is wired to recognize patterns. It’s what kept our ancestors from frying up the neon yellow frog. (“Hmmm…last time we cooked a neon animal, Uncle Louis died…Maybe we’ll stick to root vegetables tonight.”) For the most part, pattern-matching serves us well. Our assumptions are generally accurate. The young white male with the glasses and cargo shorts probably is a programmer. The soccer-Mom-type beside him probably is not. Only, this time…she is.

Joining a cohort at The Iron Yard is a life-changing risk. Greenville Front End Engineering graduate Matt recently posted about what that experience was like and how it's paying off for him and his family now.

I can’t believe my life right now. 609 days ago I quit my job as a Specialty Team Leader at Whole Foods Market- a great job in many ways that was marred by the pressure and politics of a corporation fighting to keep its place atop a niche in the food industry. [...] On that Saturday afternoon 609 days ago, I had no idea what would happen. I simply knew that things had to change. I called Sarah from work and said, “I’m about to quit and come home.” She remained incredibly calm and supportive (as she always does) and said, “Okay, I love you.” I thought about our 1 year old, Emerson. I thought about our yet to be born baby Brooks. I worried about how to provide for their future. But I worried more that day about what kind of example I would become to them if I didn’t act with courage, step out into the unknown and embrace a better life for us all.

Atlanta Rails Engineering student Andrew House writes about the process of learning how to learn:

I have been living in a state of being uncomfortable. It’s a weird feeling. Always having to look up resources, reading articles, and watching videos. It is constant learning. At first, this style was incredibly uneasy. I would feel constantly anxious and stressed. Why didn’t I have the answers? Why was I having such a hard time finding answers? There is a great skill in asking the right questions, and a very valuable lesson I learned. I think my next blog post will be how to google 101, or googling for rails dummies. The evolution of my ability to see through what problem I am facing and being able to search for that specific problem has been astonishing. I’m starting to transition from being uneasy all the time to enjoying the hunt.