Alex Nunan

Get to know Alex Nunan

What are you looking for in your next role?

As a junior developer, I still need to explore the many potential career paths, and find what will work best for me. Ideally my next role would offer strong guidance in a mentorship style, to not only expand my programming knowledge, but also my understanding of the industry. Additionally, I would like to work at a small to medium sized company that could provide creative autonomy in my day to day responsibilities.

Why did you decide to change career and/or educational paths? What was your prior path and how did you end up down that road initially?

I went to Bentley University to study business and economics, but I had never chosen a career path I was confident I would be happy in. After my time at Bentley, I found a role at a local bank while I continued to think about where I wanted to take my career. I found the work I was doing monotonous but was complacent. Finally, in January 2023, I was laid off along with 20% of the company, and I decided that was the time to make a change. I learned about Launch Academy through a friend and he explained the curriculum and process. I knew I enjoyed coding, as I had learned basic Python in high school with friends, and had taken a Java course at Bentley. Additionally, I love puzzles of all kinds, and I knew coding could provide a great professional outlet for that hobby. My experience at Launch Academy has reinforced my interest in programming, and I am excited to start fresh in this new career path.

Where have you been involved in the tech community (events attended, volunteer activities, etc.)?

I am new to the tech space in my professional life, but many of my friends and family members are developers. I look forward to engaging with the larger tech community with them and my future coworkers. I have seen postings for a variety of programming events in Boston I would like to attend with my peers at Launch Academy. I would particularly like to participate in a hackathon, and put my programming skills to the test outside of Launch Academy.

What has been the most fulfilling aspect of your journey towards becoming a web developer? What's been your biggest challenge and how have you overcome it?

Launch Academy offers a very fast paced learning environment with which students are expected to learn and utilize a wide variety of programming tools and multiple programming languages. When I started at Launch, the sheer volume of knowledge in the curriculum was daunting. Opening my first project files, and seeing multiple folders with files of different types was stressful. However, through each week of the program, I became more confident and comfortable with the concepts and tools. Now, examining and understanding each line of a full stack web application is extremely satisfying, and I am excited to expand that knowledge base. Early on at Launch Academy, the most challenging and frustrating part of the program was debugging my projects. I worked very quickly and often wrote many lines of code without testing the features I was adding. This made it very difficult to identify the specific problems occurring when bugs arose. Moreover, I am competitive with myself, and I would rarely ask for help. With help and advice from my seniors, I started to slow down, and work on different features one at a time. I learned various tools for debugging and would seek help if those failed. This experience has proved to be one of the biggest moments of growth in my professional life.

If you had an unlimited budget and resources, what would you build?

I would build an application to help musicians find other musicians to play with in their local area. In my experience, many beginner and intermediate musicians struggle to find bandmates, or just someone to jam with. My dream app would provide the platform for users to display their talents and find other musicians for collaboration.