I came, I saw, and it was awesome.
All of my fellow Rails classmates did amazing. It was so much fun watching everyone go up and present their final projects. Not a single person lacked passion and love for their project. I have a lot of pride in my project, Pricimate.

The idea for my project came from my wife. She’s in touch with the artistic community and knew that there was a void for new artists.
They don’t know how to price their works of art for sell.
So I made that my mission. Help Artists Price Their Work I proceeded to scrum out what my wife/client believed to be important, calculated my story points for each, and found my priority list.
For MVP, I got all of my basic features working in Rails. But that wasn’t good enough, I needed more dynamic features, so I proceeded to work in AngularJS. In the end, my app worked exactly how I wanted it to.

I practiced my presentation many, many, many times. Being 100% prepared was essential for me. Stumbling, forgetting where I was, or skipping a few sentences were not things I was going to do.
And I nailed it.
We had 6 minutes alloted for presentations; Mine was 5:57 (we had a timer on our podium). I felt like I had complete confidence in my app because I prepared as much as I did. People had engaging questions after my presenations, like what I had to offer was very interesting to them. More importantly, in intermission I had three people come up and directly compliment my app, offer their direct feedback(which was great) and wanted to know my current employment status.
I was floating.

I had so much fun at The Iron Yard.
Would definitely recommend it to anyone who wanted to learn an insane amount of content in a short amount of time. It requires dedication. You will get out what you put into it. Being satisfied by getting the work done isn’t enough. You have to push yourself and take what is given and throw it up a couple of levels.
Don’t like the page having refresh over and over? Use Ajax, or something like AngularJS.
The beginning Ruby assignments seem easy to you? Write tests for them, or throw up your work on sinatra.
There are countless things to do to push learning to the absolute maximum, and it all falls on your dedication. I loved every bit of being there, I don’t regret a day I spent at The Iron Yard. I feel 100% confident I can solve many complex problems I don’t have the answer to, and that is because of my training. Now the job hunt begins, and I don’t feel like it’ll be too stressful because of how much weight the name “The Iron Yard” holds.
Life is pretty great when you push yourself.