Ana Rita

I have been working as a Financial Services Tax Consultant at a Big4 Consulting Company (Deloitte) since September 2017. I work as a tax consultant to banks, insurance companies, and real estate companies, completing tasks such as managing client accounts, analyzing tax returns and other tax matters, and providing tax treatments and answers to our clients. 

I had barely any experience in coding. I had some classes of Visual Basic in my bachelor degree but I never got to develop the skills I was learning as the classes were only once a week during a 2 month period. Then, when I started working in my current job, my department made numerous partnerships with other teams inside the company to develop some apps and… 

I did some research on coding courses but I didn't try any before SheCodes. I found SheCodes on Instagram and decided to attend the beginner workshop so I could develop new skills, find out what it was like to code, and discover the potential of coding. 

I had no clue what to expect in the beginner workshop. I was not familiar with any of the languages I knew we were going to study, and I was a little bit apprehensive since I had no previous knowledge in the area. I was a management graduate who had done a masters degree in Tax Law afterwards, so I felt far away from training my logical thinking and was pretty scared I was not going to succeed at it. To my surprise it was really easy. 

The learning process was much easier than I expected because of the way the workshops were built - for each set of concepts we had some challenges to complete and we were always able to clarify any doubts with the SheCodes team. My favorite part was the fact that the classes were divided into small videos, each one with a challenge associated, which always allowed me to put into practice what I had just learned and see exactly how it worked. The content was really well structured, very well explained and easy to follow. Also, having homework and a project to work on showed me how much potential there is in coding. 

Besides being an online course, which may lead people to think they will not commit to it as they would if it were an in-person class, I never felt this along my experience. After finishing a week, I was always motivated to keep going as I was seeing I was really learning and I wanted to know where the course would take me. I wanted to finish each one of the challenges and give more steps into building my own application and to see if I was able to do it! Having a group chat where you can ask for others’ opinions, where you can clarify doubts, see other people's progress and learn with what other people are doing is a big plus on this course, too!

SheCodes is totally worth it, because I had so much support and so much content available compared to other courses online. The courses gave me all the tools needed in order to complete each challenge, homework, and final project, but at the same time, it allowed me the possibility to research for myself some of the things if I wanted to get deeper in any of the themes I worked with throughout the course. This course has offered me all the tools I needed to develop my projects.

Also, the process of developing logical thinking from coding really helped in my job. Sometimes when developing tools (even in Excel for example), or building a simple response to a client, I got myself designing all the processes I needed to account for first, before starting to build or write anything. I started to catch myself a lot more thinking that I wanted my end result to be X, but first I needed to figure out how I was going to do A, B, and C tasks first in order to reach the goal I wanted.

I would like to continue developing my skills in the languages and frameworks I learned in SheCodes Plus, and maybe who knows - I might start a new career in coding in the future. 

I really enjoyed the courses, and I highly recommend them to everyone who wants to develop their skills in HTML/CSS/JavaScript and also looks forward to learning a lot more things including React, Bootstrap, GitHub, and Hosting. 

I found the courses were really easy to follow through, and for someone who had never had any experience in coding it was always easy to follow each class.

If you are interested in developing new skills and you are curious on the potential of coding and what you could achieve with some lines of code, but you are afraid it isn't for you and that you wouldn't go along with it? Try SheCodes workshop, it is totally worth it. You benefit not only from learning something new but also from meeting other people with different backgrounds, it is a great experience. You'll learn some coding basics in HTML/CSS and JavaScript and you'll be able to put them in practice and to develop your first ever project!!! It is a very good experience for someone who never tried coding before and wants to see what it can offer.

If you want to improve your coding skills and learn to work with the React Framework, and learn the latest technologies in front-end development this is an amazing place to start. This course provided me with all the tools I needed to develop my projects and to complete my challenges, and I learned so much during the three months I took this course. I got to develop my logical thinking, learn how to structure my ideas, how to connect different technologies to achieve the result I wanted, all at the same time I was learning how to manage HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, and React. Also, I believe that living nowadays in a very technological world which is constantly evolving really demands that we evolve with it. Developing skills in this area will be a plus when looking for a job, even if you don't want to pursue a career in tech.