Tony Greeley

Hey there! After years of being held captive to retail I finally made the decision to do something about it and enrolled in a full stack (MERN) coding bootcamp at Northwestern University here in Chicago. I knew going into it my strengths would lie in back-end development as I am more logic driven than I am visual/creative. CSS was definitely rough, Bootstrap helped a little, but once we started JavaScript is when I started to really take off. During the class I was also working full-time as, and currently still am, a Genius at the Genius Bar in an Apple Store (which I am coming up to 9 years there), so I was quite literally burning the candle at both ends. One day after class, my teacher (best teacher in the world might I add, I wouldn’t have made it through the program without out him and am now happy to have him as a lifelong friend and mentor), stopped and told me that I was meant to code, as in my homework I had things that take some devs months to understand and I just seemed to “get it.” He also then said he was actually somewhat mad I didn’t figure out I should pursue coding until I was already 36 years old. As of today I have graduated and have started the hunt to finally have a job that not only am I good at, but am also happy at. Since class I have continued to expand my knowledge and am currently working on getting TypeScript down and also want to start focusing on unit testing as it was very much skimmed over in class (so far having been using Jest & Enzyme as they seem to be the most React friendly). Here to simply continue to learn and grow, as far as what’s next? Not sure yet, just loving the journey and letting it lead the way.