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Alumni Stories: Emily Porta

From Librarian to Front-End Web Developer: Why the HackerYou Community Matters to New Developers

2018-02 HackerYou Marketing-2729

Blog — Student Stories Alumni Stories: Emily Porta

2 min read

Photo of Emily Porta

By Emily Porta

Scrum Master

Rangle.io

Emily Porta is a graduate of our Spring 2014 bootcamp and just completed our part-time Ruby on Rails course. Before coming to HackerYou, Emily worked as a librarian. She's now a Front-End Web Developer at Shift Health. You can check out her work and more of her writing here. Before starting the bootcamp, what were you up to? I was living in Toronto, working in my third contract position since graduating from my master’s degree! What was it that drew your to HackerYou? How real and honest they were about what they were offering. They promised a lot, and still over-delivered, but that wasn’t surprising because of their honesty the whole way through the process. You don’t feel like you’re a customer to them, I could tell from the very beginning that they genuinely cared about my future and would follow through on every promise. I was also drawn to the large percentage of women in the programs, a testament to the welcoming environment they’ve made. What stands out to you as a highlight during your time in class? The fact that a lot of the people in our class still hang out regularly is a huge plus for me. While I was in class, I was pretty heads-down focused on my work the whole time, but I really enjoyed having a group of people around that were all very different, but shared important goals and values. Immediately after the program was over, we stayed in touch, and still do. I love that! Coming out of the bootcamp, where have you settled in the world? I’m still living in my favourite city, Toronto, working downtown! Eventually I might spend a year or two in another major city, but I’ll always come back here :) What keeps you connected to the HackerYou community? Slack is the obvious answer - I know I can always log in and there’ll be people there to talk with from all the cohorts. It definitely builds a sense of community between classes. The Lab itself does a great job of this, too. It’s so open and inviting and there’s so many classes going on. It’s always a place to go and work and chat with friends, or meet new people from the various classes. Now that it’s been just over a year since I attended the bootcamp, I really love seeing the new people come in (especially to the full-time program), because they’re all making such a great decision for their lives.


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