Since graduating from the Lighthouse Lab's full-time Web Development Bootcamp, Cody Brouwers has been honing his coding skills at FlipGive, a fundraising eCommerce startup in Toronto. Coming from a career in corporate HR consulting, this opportunity has been a positive change of pace for Cody. Read further to learn more about his experience at Lighthouse Labs and what other things he has been doing since.

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What were you doing before Lighthouse Labs?

I was a product solutions consultant at an HR consulting firm for a year, and before that I was at Ryerson University getting my Bachelor of Commerce Degree in Finance!

What made you decide to come to Lighthouse Labs?

I started learning programming online because I was getting bored with my job at the time and I eventually decided that if I wanted to really make a career of it in the shortest amount of time then I would need to get some help. I chose Lighthouse Labs out of all the other bootcamps in Toronto because when I spoke to the staff I found them the most genuine and helpful.

It’s been exactly a year since you graduated Lighthouse Labs, what have you been up to?

I have been working at FlipGive which is a fundraising eCommerce startup in Toronto. I work mainly in the backend and specialize in maintaining and setting up all of the third party API integrations we have.

How did Lighthouse prepare you for your transition from bootcamp to full-time developer?

The full-time Web Development Bootcamp was a fantastic learning experience that prepared me for my current job by making me really get into the mindset of a developer and most importantly teaching me how to learn. I really liked the structure of the course in that it encouraged pair programming which is essential once you start a developer job and also the technical interviews which were great at helping me prepare the job search.

Tell us about living in Toronto as a Developer!

I think Toronto is a great city to be a developer in, the tech scene is still growing fast and there are always meet ups to go to for any kind of tech you're interested in.

What technologies are you working with?

FlipGive is built entirely in Ruby on Rails with most templating in Haml but we have started to add React to parts of the site.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a developer?

I've been asked this quite a bit and what I always tell people is to start teaching yourself with all of the amazing free resources available online. It will be tough but if you enjoy it and can see yourself making a career programming then I definitely suggest looking into joining a bootcamp as that's the fastest most cost effective way I know of getting into the industry.

What's the weirdest, or most interesting part of your job?

I think the most interesting part of my job is just working at a small startup of 15-20 people. Most of my work experience has been at larger corporate firms and life at a startup is very different but entirely for the positive! I love working on a small team and how much more productive and less bureaucratic we are able to be compared to a larger company.

Any side projects?

My girlfriend is starting to get into User Experience (UX) so she's designed this social media app that I've started building in React Native.

What's next?

There are a lot of really amazing features and updates we are planning on making to FlipGive in the coming months so I'm looking forward to being a part of those and hopefully getting that side project off the ground!