In November 2019 I saw a poster advertising the jhub coding scheme, a scheme which encourages service personnel to learn a variety of coding and tech skills. I decided to sign up and have a go at their web development module. Fast forward 4 months and I had completed the required open source course and submitted (and passed) the assessment – I created a single page site which allows users to enter meteorological conditions and find out the impact it would have on certain military operations. This developed my passion and interest in coding and thus followed many months of freeCodeCamp, YouTube tutorials and Udemy courses.
After deciding to leave the forces back in February, I joined TechVets and stumbled across an advert for dt-squad who were offering one to one software development training for service leavers – all absolutely free. I decided to get in contact and after an initial half hour chat with Peter I had my first lesson two days later and jumped headfirst into Python.
Over the next few weeks Peter and I covered Flask, Jinja, Bootstrap and started to scratch the surface of OpenCV, a computer vision library that we used for image analysis (but is capable of so much more!). I decided that my first main project would be an image editing application which allows users to upload their own photo and apply a number of filters.
The site relies on Flask for the back-end, makes use of OpenCV for image editing and uses Dropzone.js to allow users to drag and drop images directly onto the site to upload them. Peter and I spent a couple of lessons delving into the awesome world of p5.js and I decided to incorporate animation into the landing page of the site. I then added a puzzle page which carves the image into squares, randomises the order and allows users to attempt to put the image back together in the correct order. Finally, I wanted to make sure the site is responsive across a number of different screen sizes and platforms. After a couple of weeks, and numerous bugs, the site is fully functioning and live.
This is the first project I have seen through from start to finish and it has taught me a lot about the process of building a product from scratch. I still cannot believe I have had over 20 hours of 1-to-1 lessons for free. If you are a service leaver interested in tech then definitely get in touch with dt-squad.