Student Spotlight: Jaime Munoz, IronHack

After working at an IT company managing programmers, Jaime Munoz decided that he wanted to learn coding skills, so he enrolled in IronHack, a coding bootcamp in Madrid (with locations in Miami and Barcelona). Jaime tells us why he chose IronHack, the technical and soft skills he learned in his course and the mentors who have helped him along the way.

What were you up to before deciding to enroll in IronHack? Did you have a technical background before applying? 

​Before being a programmer​ I was Project Manager in a big IT company. I hired programmers, and managed their work. After some time I began to be more and more interested in the work those programmers were doing. So much that I decided to quit my job and learn to code. I did a Master's degree of 400 hours in CICE (a IT school in Madrid) with the great luck to have an amazing teacher called Devta Singh. I learned much more than just coding from him. He showed me how to face the problem, find the better solution, and how to succeed on it. It was a personal revelation, and since this moment I knew that I wanted to be a programmer. 

After the degree I started to work in a digital advertising company called The Fact. We worked for traditional offline advertising companies they needed digital development for his clients. I improved my php and javascript skills there during almost 2 years, but I had the feeling I wasn't improving faster enough. I tried to look for something new to stimulate myself and began to teach coding in a IT academy from Madrid called Trazos, but I needed a change to keep pushing my skills. That's why I turned to IronHack.

Was IronHack the only bootcamp you applied to? What about IronHack convinced you to go there (the languages they taught, instructors, price etc)? 

​IronHack was my first and last choice. Honestly, I didn't knew many bootcamps, but the main reason were the instructors and the great professionals they talked very good about the course. Many of the coders I admire like Keyvan Akbary or Carlos Blé were involved and interested on the bootcamp. This was enough to make the choice.​

Can you talk about a time when you got stuck in the class and how you pushed through?

​Fortunately I did not got stuck a lot in class, but when I did not understood something I asked for more explanations and I received it immediately and solved the problem.​

What were your classmates and instructors like?  

​They were all amazing. I guess I was very very very lucky on that point, because all my classmates were amazing. Not only because they were friendly (they really were), but because they were skilled and interested to push like I was.
It's amazing when you share such experience with people they think and like the same thinks like you, because it pushed the level very high.
The instructors were also great. Very friendly and open to discuss or try whatever we asked for. I think they can't imagine how thankful I am.​ But not only with the teachers or students. Also with Ironhack's staff. They did everything possible to make us receive what we needed.

Tell us about your final project! What does it do, what technologies did you use, how long did it take, etc? 

​For my final project I used Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS and Javascript​, to develop a online medical appointments application. It took a week to have something working and able to be shown in the demo day.

What are you working on now? Do you have a job as a developer? What does it entail? 

​I'm working now in MarketGoo.com (a website marketing and SEO online "do it yourself" tool​) as full stack developer. I use PHP, MySQL, HTML5, LESS, Phinx, PHPActiveRecord, JavaScript and other technologies every day, but the key is that I'm not only a developer there. I'm also involved in the product management, collaborating every day in decisions about the product, his look and feel, his behavior and the business itself.

Would you have been able to learn what you now know without IronHack? 

​Maybe I could be able to learn the technical part, but there is no way to learn it in 2 months without a bootcamp. It's just too much information to handle it alone.​ Besides, there is much more than the technical knowledge that you receive in IronHack. You also get a lot of contacts, friends, experience, knowhow and the most important thing: a perspective of what you don't know yet.

Want to learn more about IronHack? Check out their School Page on Course Report or their website here. Want to catch up with Jaime? Read his blog or follow him on Twitter!