Shea Furey-King

This has been an amazing year of growth, professional development, risks, and wins. My code journey began before this list, but I wanted to track the things I’ve done this past year.

• Visited Flatiron School. As part of my exploratory phase of pivoting into tech, I attended one of Flatiron’s “Students Presents” meetups on November 10, 2015.
• I wrote my first lines of code (not HTML or CSS) in Ruby in February 2016.
• I made some of my first commits to Github at a Git/Gihub GDI NYC meetup!
• After receiving the advice “attend meetups” on how to get into tech, I attended my first “social” tech meetup called “Building Your Digital Presence” on April 6, 2016. I did not know what to expect, but I found myself comfortable and accepted immediately despite not working in tech at the time.
• Got accepted into Flatiron School’s iOS Development program. Their acceptance rate is approximately 6%. I made a serious decision to leave my job in communications and start coding full-time.
• Started my first technical blog. (This one!)
• My first app, CareerSpark, got accepted to the App Store. I had an amazing team consisting of me and two other Flatiron School students.
• Attended the try!Swift Conference. After two months of learning Swift full-time, I was nervous to attend a conference with the language’s most experienced developers, but I loved learning from other attendees’ experiences in the field and hearing about specific topics in the language and workplace.
• Starting teaching HTML and CSS to high school students twice a week through ScriptEd. The first lesson I taught was on Github!
• Got invited by the White House to present CareerSpark as part of the Opportunity Project Demo day. Presented my app in the White House! 
• Attended my first hackathon and my team won 2 awards: Audience Choice and Best App by a mixed-age team. We won $625 total!
• Attended my second hackathon and my team won Best Use of SeatGeek API,  a $1000 prize for our iOS app Meet Geek.
• Helped someone else learn to use Firebase in an Objective-C project as a TA during a Women in iOSoho Meetup.
• Attended Ela Conf in Philadelphia and met some amazing women technologists.

Since embarking on my coding journey I have made 503 commits, I have attended 2 tech conferences, and met countless amazing and inspiring people. As 2017 approaches, I am looking forward to the next set of challenges and milestones. Are you working on a project I should know about? Have a question about doing any of these things yourself? Please, send me a message!

Special thanks to Lisa Yoder and Ela Conf for the reminder to track wins and document progress. 💚