Joe Winter

  • About Me

Blog Topics

  • Career
  • Code
  • Meta
  • Potpourri

© 2015–2025 Joe Winter

Life at The Iron Yard

October 26, 2015 By Joe Winter 3 Comments

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.

Image Credit: Unknown

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Filed Under: Potpourri

Comments

  1. Clem says

    October 26, 2015 at 8:31 pm

    Love it! It’s great to hear about your adventures.

    Reply
    • Joe Winter says

      October 26, 2015 at 8:45 pm

      Thanks, Clem! It’s always good to hear from you.

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. The Iron Yard student stories - October says:
    October 27, 2015 at 10:31 am

    […] –Joe […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to Joe's Blog

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Find Me Elsewhere

  • View joeventures’s profile on Facebook
  • View joeventures’s profile on Twitter
  • View nine.eye.joe’s profile on Instagram
  • View joeventures’s profile on LinkedIn
  • View Joeventures’s profile on GitHub
%d