Kelley Rose just finished the Front End Engineering program at The Iron Yard and is ready to embark on her next adventure. When she’s not rock climbing, she’s combining her creative and technical skills to create beautiful web applications that are both simple and practical. Her combination of creativity and tech savviness sets her apart from her peers and makes her a great addition to any team. Check her out.
What past tech projects have you worked on?
During the past three months, I’ve worked on a number of projects, but these are the two biggest undertakings I’m most proud of.
Komik!: At The Iron Yard Hackathon, our group was given the task to create a web and iOS application where users could use their own images (or any they find online) and create comics out of them by dragging and dropping accessories onto the image. Being my first hackathon, it was exciting and scary to have such a small amount of time to get a true minimally viable product completed. We worked tirelessly, plenty of ups and plenty of downs, and ended up with an MVP we were proud of. The hackathon forced us to work extremely hard in a short amount of time, and really stick to the MVP we came up with. The experience I gathered just from working alongside my group members was invaluable.
zone in: This is the project I’m personally most proud of thus far. I’m pretty active, rock climbing being my sport of choice, so this idea came from a personal need when I’m training. I’m working closely with a Ruby on Rails developer to see it come to fruition. In three weeks we will have created a web application for users to create individual workouts, then build week(s) long training plans from the individual workouts and save them to their personal calendar. I’m building the front end using AngularJS, which I absolutely love, and the backend is Ruby on Rails.This project has provided me with the valuable lesson to properly scale a project for a given timeframe. There is so much that can be done with this application, but not all can be accomplished successfully in three weeks. I’m looking forward to continuing with the project past these three weeks.
What are your best technical or creative skills?
I’m both technical and creative, which is probably my best quality. I can see a vision through communication and implement it with user experience in mind, as well as the interface.
I love problem solving, which is my most valuable trait when it comes to development and creativity. That along with my ability to communicate clearly to anyone about a vision, and about the technical side of that vision is what sets me apart.
What’s next on your list to learn?
Oh, gosh, the never ending list of things I want to learn! I absolutely love the front end side of things, and am so enamored with mobile web that I think the natural next step would be iOS development. However, working with the backend developers these past few weeks has sparked my interest in learning that side as well. I’ll probably start with iOS and see how I feel after that.
What’s your ideal internship/job?
Something that keeps me going. Keeps me learning day in and day out. I got into web development because the technology is ever changing, and forces you to stay on your toes, which I need in order to keep my interest. I want a position that is constantly challenging me, and would love a place where where I can find a mentor to guide me in the right direction when they see me start to steer the wrong way.
Interested in startups?
Absolutely. The startup scene is exciting, and most startups are looking to be on the cutting edge of technology, which is exactly where I want to be.
Post graduation plans?
Keep working on zone in, start thinking of new concepts, and play around with Node.js a little more. I love writing JavaScript, so I’m very interested in how to utilize Node. Then I plan to check out other languages, probably starting with iOS development.
