It’s been just over a week since I left Barcelona and the Ironhack course. It was a truly incredible experience in a broader sense than I expected.

The final two weeks were spent working on a personal project developed using the technologies that we learned during the course. I had a great mentor (@mediafinger) and worked on a little project called Townbikes – an AirBnB-style site for specialty bikes. Check out the github repo or Heroku app.  It was super-fun to work on something for ourselves: planning, creating, iterating and testing but it was also kind of strange to work by ourselves so much after spending so much time working in pairs or teams.

On the final Friday morning, we presented our projects to the rest of the class and a panel of judges. we spoke about the technologies we chose to use, how we implemented them and what worked or didn’t work for us. You can see the slides of my presentation here. After presenting to the class, I thought it was all over, but then the jury selected five projects to present later in the afternoon to an audience at the Hackshow. My project was selected…

It was a real honour to be selected as a finalist, but I wasn’t sure how my nerves would stand up to having to present again. It went ok, I think. You can watch the full stream and judge for yourself:

I wore my glasses specifically so that I wouldn’t have to see the audience which was a real revelation for me, presentation-wise. I highly recommend it as a tactic for nervous presenters.

I am so proud of the other projects that were presented at the Hackshow. They really blew me away and made me so pleased to be a part of something. I can’t even imagine how the judges made their decisions because all the projects were super cool.

Something I particularly liked about the last two weeks was that about half of the class continued to come to MOB every day and maintained a real sense of continuity even after our regular classes had finished. With that core group there every day working hard, it was much easier for me to also maintain my concentration.

And now I’m home. Real life has begun and it seems very strange to me now. I miss all the friends I made at Ironhack, I miss my teachers and I even miss the learning that I did every day.