Ryan Nolan
Aspiring Front End Developer Looking to Land My First Junior Role.
Download CV
Aspiring Front End Developer Looking to Land My First Junior Role.
Download CV
Hi I'm Ryan,
I have been working as a Production Manager for the past 9 years and
have decided to make a career change into software development as I
enjoy being creative and problem solving. Currently, I am working
part-time while building projects and applying for jobs.
After making the decision to leave my previous job I enrolled on a
coding bootcamp with Northcoders, Manchester. Northcoders is an
intensive coding bootcamp that offers a full-time, 13-week course in
software development. During the course, I learnt a range of
programming languages, tools and technologies, including HTML, CSS,
JavaScript, React, Node.js, Express, SQL, and Git.
In addition to the technical skills I learnt, I also developed a
range of other skills that are valued by employers. For example, I
learnt how to work collaboratively as part of a team, pair
programming, how to communicate effectively with colleagues and
clients, and how to manage my time and workload effectively.
After graduating the course I feel that I gained a strong foundation
in software development, which has given me the confidence to create
my own projects which I will be documenting on this portfolio.
This is a rock paper scissors game I made for The Odin Project.
I thought this would be quite straight forward but there was a few
head scratching moments, mainly with getting the correct scores to
display at the right times. I also learnt how to use audio tags and
custom fonts.
This is a rework of the original fuel price comparison app I made. I
was happy with the original app at the time but I'd mainly focused
on the app's appearance and hadn't paid too much attention to the
efficiency / readability of code. I decided to build it again with
everything I had learnt, here are the key improvements I made:
- The API is only called once, on the previous app the API was
called every time a button was clicked. This worked but wasn't very
efficient so now the API is called and then the data is filtered
locally.
- To minimise the amount of repeated code, I reduced the JavaScript
from 275 lines to 103, and the CSS from 331 lines to 156.
- I used array methods instead of for loops to make the code more
readable and easier to understand.
- To improve security, I stored the API key in an .env file and
accessed it using Express and Cors middleware in a Node.js server. I
then made a fetch request to the server to retrieve the API key.
- I built the app mobile-first, which made it simpler to create a
responsive design that worked well on desktops as well as mobile
devices.
This is the first project I have built after graduating from
Northcoders, a fuel price comparison app that lets you search by
fuel type and then sort by distance and price. I remember attempting
this 5 months ago and struggling to even get a console log from the
API so I'm really happy with the progress I've made. The languages
used are HTML, CSS and Javascript.
I had a lot of fun building this app and learnt a lot from the
issues that I ran into in the process such as:
- Discovering after at least an hour that the API trial key wont
work for post codes that don't include an "A" so my code was working
perfectly but I wasn't using the correct post code 😅
- Somehow creating a weird loop that went through the 1000 requests
a day limit and locked me out for 24 hours so I couldn't carry on
working on it for a day, very frustrating.
- Spending hours and hours with CSS / Flexbox trying to get things
to display properly on all devices.
During the last 2 weeks of the Software Development bootcamp, I
worked in a team of four to create our app "Barber Shop". Barber
Shop is a booking system which allows users to browse their
available hair appointments as well as book and pay for their
appointments through the app. Users can also login in to view
previous and upcoming appointments.
The main thing I learnt when creating the app was how to effectively
work as a team as we had a stand up each morning, worked in pairs
and kept in contact constantly to discuss the progress of the app
The first project I developed was a project called NC Games, which
is a board game review app. It allows users to view, comment on, and
upvote/downvote board game reviews. The project consisted of two
parts: front end and back end development.
For the back end, I created an API to access application data to be
displayed on the front end. I used node-postgres to interact with a
PSQL database. This allowed me to efficiently manage and store user
data.
The front end section involved displaying the data with React, and
making the page responsive for different view ports. By using
responsive design techniques, I ensured that the app was accessible
on multiple devices, making it easy for users to engage with the
content.