Ward pharmacy technicianJunior full-stack developer, a hospital software supplier
“I did 24 weeks of evenings after twelve-hour shifts. The timetable was the only reason it was possible.”
I had been teaching myself from videos for a year and kept stalling at the same place: I could follow a tutorial, but I could not start anything from a blank file. Week one at Brackwell was exactly that, a blank file and a mentor sitting next to me until I had a page live.
The part-time timetable mattered more than I expected. Tuesday and Thursday evenings plus Saturday mornings meant I never had to swap a shift. When a run of nights wiped out a fortnight, my mentor moved my checkpoint by a week and nobody made it a drama.
My team project was a stock-check tool for a food bank in Shirley. I talked about it in every interview, because it had real users and real bugs. Nine weeks after demo day I signed with a company that builds software for hospital pharmacies, so the ward years turned out to be an advantage.