From Craft to Code

Though my time at The Iron Yard has come to it's final end (after graduation, after career development, and after Demo Day) and I have come out a whole new person. I have a newfound confidence that I never knew I was capable of before. I've overcome so many of my personal fears and feel like I am a stronger person now that I have challenged myself in a field I previously felt I didn't belong in. The road ahead is going to continue to be difficult as a I find my way in but I know I can handle it and for the first time in a long time I am proud of what I have accomplished. The LGBT redesign will be a continuous project I work on with the Center until we implement the new look. I still have the Corky's Kettle Corn site to update as well. In between those projects I continue to update my previous projects by writing well crafted READMEs, refactoring old code, adding new features, and implementing unit testing. With so many new tools available to me I know it is only a

It is officially the last week of career development at The Iron Yard and our prototype, even stretched, is complete! Today Kelly and I review the presentation, practice it, and film tomorrow during rehearsals. October 25th is demo day and we are prepped, practiced, and ready to go! I am very proud of what we've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time! Over the next few weeks I will continue to work with the Center on implementing our prototype and then continuing to maintain it over time. The experience I've had working with them is invaluable and I am absolutely grateful at the opportunity to work with the community and build something that will help sustain and grow the LGBT Center of Raleigh. I am already looking forward to the lessons I will learn going forward. I anticipate a trial period that will require changes to our design. After hearing feedback from the community, volunteers, and members I anticipate a lot of excitement but certainly items tha

Now that our immediate actionable goal has completed, Kelly and I are stretching our project to include more pages than just the original home page. We have most of the internal links fleshed out but the remaining tasks seem endless and daunting. They are absolutely achievable issues. There are, however, many achievable tasks to make up a whole mountain. One of my favorite sayings that has prevailed over the last few days is "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." What I've learned so far definitely aligns with that statement. It's easiest to tackle a project by breaking it into manageable pieces and doing one line of code at a time. For this project in particular, we've been utilizing a lot of Github's tools for tracking issues, listing problems, and delegating assignments. Each day I aim to resolve at least four issues and tackle any that I see along the way.