Life at The Iron Yard

This week will mark the half-way point of a 12-week course I have been attending at The Iron Yard. Through this course, “Back End Engineering” I have been learning Ruby on Rails.

Well… I have been learning Ruby. This week we are just now getting into Rails. Each day has offered new lessons. No, really. We learn a thing once, put it into practice in our homework, and move on to the next lesson. We only have eight or nine weeks to get the basics somewhat ingrained into our heads before we dive into final projects.

I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunities I had earlier in life to pick up some technical skills here and there, starting with my first “real” job working technical support, and then later working with WordPress and learning PHP and the WordPress API over the past few years at C4 Atlanta.

What drove me to decide to take a class at the Iron Yard? Take a moment to put your ear to ground and it’s not difficult to find plenty of discussion around the value of code academies like this one. General Assembly is probably the largest of them, and certainly well-respected. The Iron Yard has done a great job of quickly scaling its operations to also expand to many cities. I took a look at some of the local alternatives as well. From everything I could tell, The Iron Yard seemed (from the outside) to deliver the greatest value, offering robust career services and a very genuine, caring attitude from the staff, alongside a rigorous curriculum. I’m happy to report that halfway into the program, The Iron Yard has not disappointed me.

A special shoutout goes to my instructor, Brit Butler, who practices and preaches a refreshingly practical approach to coding. I have on several occasions gone back to PHP code I wrote before I began my first lesson at The Iron Yard and let’s just say I’m looking forward to taking some time to refactor what I’ve written and maybe even make it useful for others to apply. More on that in a later post.

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