Student Spotlight: Jose Casanova, Tealeaf

Jose Casanova graduated from Tealeaf Academy and shares a review of his experience with Course Report!

My only regret is that I did not sign up for Tealeaf sooner. I started off with only the first course and thought it was really good. I finished that course with a great understanding of Ruby and felt I can debug any Ruby issue. I ended up enrolling in the other two courses (I wish I did all three at the same time to save money) and they were exceptional. The course material is organized in a way for you to get a great understanding of Rails if you put in the time and effort. I was doing the unstructured courses/tutorials route (one month rails, hatl's rails tutorial, codeschool, lynda, books and the list goes on), but its nothing like having a group of experienced developers there to help you.

Whenever I ran into an issue during the course, and couldn't find the answer on Google, I knew that I was able to turn to the Tealeaf discussion board/mentors for help, which is nice because they don't solve the issue for you, but explain the ways to go about figuring out the answer. About a month after finishing the last course, I did my first hackathon and was in hot demand as a Rails developer. Not only did I build an idea that I've been wanting to build for some time, but built it within the 24 hour time window with all of the features that I wanted too! This was really amazing for me because I had been wanting to build that idea out for YEARS but never knew how. Tealeaf taught me how. 

Anyways, not only did Tealeaf prepare me to be technically proficient for a Rails job, but also let me other non-technical aspects of working as a developer (type of job interviews, culture, etc). Its been less than a month since I finished the last course and I already got hired to be a developer-in-residence at a startup incubator! The best part? I wasn't actively looking for a job, but was sought out due to my online presence (Github) and the quality of code I produced for my Tealeaf projects.

Thank you Tealeaf!!

About the reviewer: Jose Santiago Casanova is a seasoned digital executive, leader and strategist. He is an expert in financial services, marketing, web development, and efficiency. Jose not only has knowledge of technical languages, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby, & Ruby on Rails, but is excellent at trouble-shooting. Jose's diverse background includes: providing marketing consulting to Loop Pay which helped the company raise over $120k on Kickstarter, web developer, marketer, and author of two books available on Amazon. When he is not hacking away on code, he enjoys riding bike, working out, and writing. Check out his website here: http://josecasanova.com