Liz Phillips - Theatre, Grace Hopper Coding Bootcamp #52
Biography
Liz Phillips is a full stack software engineer in New York City. She has a strong background in design from her previous career working in theater and film. Every week you can tune into her educational Twitch stream where she’s creating a welcoming community for coders of all skill levels to meet other coders, ask questions, and learn by working on a real open source projects and answering questions. Liz jumped into tech through the Grace Hopper coding bootcamp.
Liz is a proud member of the The Live Coders Twitch stream team. Liz believes in using coding powers to help others. If you’re on the streets of New York you might see her skate by.
Episode Summary
“With coding. You have an input and you have an output and like all the stuff in between is kind of artistic.”
“In the boot camp you were going through HTML, CSS jQuery, React all the way up through building the whole stack. In three months.”
“Try some free resources. Try code academy. Try free code camp. See if you like it. If you can afford it, take a coding bootcamp prep class, see if you like it. And if you do those things and you’re like, ‘Wow, I really enjoyed this’, you can totally do it for a living.”
“I feel like if I wanted to, I could go a lot of different places and thats something I just never had with theater, which is really nice. Also, I now have this skill set that opens a lot of doors for different things that I want to do, whether that’s trying to teach other people things or making an app that might make me money or doing the twitch streaming.“
—Liz Phillips
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Liz’s story in her own words
- What led Liz you into theater, SCAD, and those early jobs doing production design work and lighting?
- Inflection points in one’s career are those critical moments where we decide to make a change. What led Liz to pick up the book on coding through to deciding to go full time at a coding bootcamp.
- The focus of this show is on helping people find their path in tech, and one great way of going down the coding path is to do a boot camp. Liz did the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy in NYC. We do a deep dive on what that program is, how it works and what the day to day looks like for someone?
- OK, so it’s one thing to go to a boot camp and it’s a whole other thing to actually land a job. How did Liz prep for those early interviews?
- Mentors, Mentors, Mentors! We’ll spend a moment talking about a mentor or two that really helped Liz along her path and the impact they had.
- How has Liz’s work in theater and production helped her in her coding career?
- We’ll switch gears and talk Twitch. Liz’s live stream is called Illuminated Space.
Additional Resources
Tune into Liz’s Twitch Channel - Illuminated Space - https://www.twitch.tv/illuminatedspace
Liz is also a part of the the group Live Coders - Learn about coding by watching coders! - https://livecoders.dev/
Learn more about the Grace Hopper Bootcamp - https://www.gracehopper.com/
