Live Projects at The Tech Academy

Though coding bootcamps provide you with the practical skills and knowledge to start a career in software development, real-world experience is the most valuable thing you can add to your resume. How do you gain experience while enrolled in a coding bootcamp? Through working on projects! Whether it’s a personal project you do in your free time, or the final project at the end of a course, practical experience will deepen your understanding and increase your chances of getting hired!

At The Tech Academy all students participate in a Live Project, or capstone project, where they do real-world development work they can add to their resumes. The Live Project is an important part of the curriculum at The Tech Academy. Students who are about to enter the workforce gain practical experience, a chance to put their newly acquired skills to use, and experience working on a dev team.

In this Q&A with The Tech Academy’s Live Project Director, Deanna, and one of her students, Andy, we get a closer look at Live Projects at The Tech Academy, and how they help students prepare to work as entry-level software developers.

Briefly tell us about Live Projects at The Tech Academy.

Deanna: Live Project is the capstone for The Tech Academy courses. Students work in a group environment to develop web-based software projects. Ideally, we have a real client that we are building a service for, but when that’s not possible, we develop projects that would have real-world applications. These projects are full stack projects, based on the languages we teach: HTML/CSS, SQL, JavaScript, and either Python or C#.

What kind of projects are students working on?

Deanna: Currently, our C# students are working on a project that is focused on managing a crew of workers across multiple locations or job types. It mirrors a project we’ve recently launched for a local construction company that wanted easy web portal access for all its employees to see weekly job assignments. Our Python students are working on an integrative collection of applications that pull information from APIs and data scraping to allow for easy travel planning and management for an end user.

What role does the instructor play during the Live Project?

Deanna: As the Live Project Director, my role is to be the project manager and scrum master for the students. I break the project down into pieces to make it more approachable for students and to help further the project. I design the projects, make sure we are meeting goals, and run all the meetings with the groups. We also have a support instructor for each project. I work with the support instructors to make sure students are getting the support they need to find research materials, gain research skills, and get past any roadblocks. The support instructors focus more closely on student needs, doing code checks, and giving feedback along the way. The students can either go to their support instructor or come to me for answers to project questions or for mentoring to develop their code.

What are some of the skills that students build while working on the Live Project that they wouldn’t otherwise get from the boot camp?

Deanna: The Live Project requires students to utilize the basic skills and knowledge from the coursework, while building problem solving and research skills. The greatest skill students learn from this experience is how to think and work like a programmer. This involves knowing how to find answers to questions, either by teaching oneself through online resources, or by reaching out to mentors who have more experience.

How does a student’s experience working on the Live Project translate into working as a software developer?

Deanna: We do our best to mimic a working environment for the Live Project. We use the agile scrum project management style to get students used to working with a deadline. The projects tackle real-world problems, similar to those students will work on once they are employed as software developers. The Live Project is sort of like a job with training wheels. It provides a supportive environment for students to hone their skills as they prepare to get their first jobs.

Andy, briefly tell us about the project you’re currently working on.

Andy: After completing all the required coursework, I’m currently participating in The Tech Academy’s Live Project, which is intended to simulate an actual team development environment in Azure DevOps. Following the agile scrum methodology, fellow student team members and I are working on an ASP.NET MVC 5 management portal web application to coordinate workflow for managers and employees.

How has your experience working on the Live Project been so far? What has been your favorite part?

Andy: The Live Project was one of my primary considerations while researching how best to transition into this new career path, and on all levels it has exceeded my expectations. It would be really difficult for me to pin down just one aspect of the Live Project as more important than another, as it’s really about gaining experience in a multitude of areas: improving my approach to problem solving, researching and applying solutions to unfamiliar topics, documenting code so that future developers can follow and improve it, and learning how to interact with a teammate when working on a similar task or story. Through this experience I have come to understand that you simply can’t gain those experiences without being involved in something as dynamic as the Live Project.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while working on the Live Project? How did you overcome it?

Andy: The biggest challenge I faced was figuring out how to preserve existing data within the project’s primary database during a model/schema revision, which was further complicated by certain configurations within the project. This is obviously of utmost concern once an application has been shifted into production, and it was quite the hurdle to overcome. After some extensive research, and equally extensive trial and error, I was able to come up with a working solution that maintained the existing data and was able to perform the necessary migrations.

In your opinion, what aspect of working on this project has best prepared you for working as a software developer?

Andy: It has been a priority of mine during the Live Project to work with other students, because that is not an experience you can gain without working in a team environment. There are nearly endless tutorials online for everything from the most simple projects to advanced architecture. With that said, none of those tutorials can prepare a developer to work within DevOps, communicate with team members via Slack, and effectively manage source control merge conflicts. While the actual tools may vary from team to team and project to project, from my perspective, those aspects have been the most valuable take-aways from the Live Project.

To learn more about The Tech Academy’s coding boot camps visit Learncodinganywhere.com

This post was sponsored by The Tech Academy. To learn more about The Tech Academy, visit Learncodinganywhere.com or check out their reviews on SwitchUp.