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Diploma in Software Development

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The past 7 months have been somewhat of a crazy blur. Not because of the unprecedented Covid19 pandemic we are living through, but because I have been crazy busy, adding new tools to my digital toolbox.

Last year, by October, I had finished 2 big contracts, that were my bread and butter money. Even before the pandemic outbreak started, I realised there just wasn’t enough work for me locally, and I needed to reach out into the remote working world more. I am used to working remote, but the majority of my clients are local. So I decided to take a week’s break, and really sit down and think about my future.

I did some more research into remote working, for international companies, and decided this was the route to take. But how can I compete with younger, more qualified design candidates, and what was the area I wanted to specialize in? Looking at what training was available to me physically, and distance learning, I applied for 2 short courses, that would allow me to spend the winter upskilling. Winter is a quite time, where I live, because of the predominant tourism industry, so its a good time to learn.

Diploma in Software Development

The first course I applied for started just 2 weeks later, and was a full time bootcamp style course in Software Development, run by the Code Institute and Kerry College. I already had an inkling of HTML and CSS, but this was going to open up a world into web development, that I had never seen before.

The course was supposed to run in the Kerry College campus, for 5 months, and was a fulltime, full on software development course, starting with HTML and CSS, working through JavaScript, APIs, Python and Django. My new journey to become a unicorn was beginning

rainblow coloured unicorn
rainbow unicorn, from the card game Unstable Unicorns

A unicorn is a “true full-stack developer” experienced in back-end development, front-end development, and architecting cloud environments and web infrastructure.

Medium

I’m not a Unicorn however, I’m a designer who can code. I can code, but reluctantly. I love HTML, CSS, just about get along with Java. I can now use databases, MongoDB, API’s such as Google Maps, Flask, Django, Heroku, AWS, etc, but they are not my areas of specialty. In fact the more the course progressed, the more obsessed I got with the UX and UI, creating wire frames, colour schemes, mockups, high fidelity prototypes and MVPs.

certificate from the code institute

The pandemic started during the middle of my course, but luckily I was able to continue working from home. I completed my course, got my certificate, got very excited for my second course, Lean in UX with the Institute of Technology Tralee.

If you want to see the coding I created for this Diploma in Software Development, they are all hosted on Github:

If you want to see some of the design work I created head over to my design website: www.triflakestudios.com


So, what do you think ?

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