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Cristina Picazo Merlos
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Welcome

My name is Cristina


In order to practice what I have learned I have made this website showing some of my projects with the hope to start working as a programmer in the near future.

Some of my Projects

Java

  • Race (Greenfoot)

    Greenfoot Project - Race

  • Student Profile (GitHub)

    Student Profile

  • Car in Garage (GitHub)

About me

I have always liked computers but it was only a few years ago that I decided to study what I really enjoy. One day I discovered a podcast about a bootcamp where lorry drivers were doing an online course. Every week the teacher made a podcast interviewing his students to check their progress and feelings. In that moment it dawn on me that the reason I enjoyed the podcast so much was because I shared their aspiration of becoming a software developer. So I started planning how to achieve my goal, while keeping my administrative job.

As a Spanish person living abroad (in Northern Ireland), having the right certificates was a barrier to enrolling any higher certificate course. I got my A levels and Higher National Certificate in Financial Business in Spain, and those certificates are not transferrable to UK education scheme, so I couldn´t use them to enroll the courses I needed in UK. Therefore, I decided to take an online Higher National Certificate in computer´s software in Spain, specifically for Development of Multi-Platform Applications.
I decided to follow the typical path and take all the subjects of the first year. Then I realized the workload was too high to balance it with work. The online training did not work well for anyone. The majority of students couldn´t manage to follow the pace of the course, and some teachers lacked the training required to impart the subjects online. After finishing my first year I managed to pass 2 subjects, which did not fulfil my expectations. I also realized that it would very hard to manage travelling to Spain to take the exams, so I decided not to continue with this course and take a different approach. I started some online courses to get the basics of multiplatform programming and decided to retake the higher certificate in Development of Multi-Platform Applications in the future.


Given that the course covered HTMS, CSS, PHP, SQL, C# and Java, I started with some certificated courses to complement those areas, such as:

  • SoloLearn, where I have learned the basics of:
    • SQL Fundamentals
    • Java Tutorial
    • C# Tutorial
    • JavaScript Tutorial
    • HTML Fundamentals
    • PHP Tutorial
  • FreeCodeCamp, which I found very useful and I would recommend to everybody.
    • Responsive Web Design Certification (300 hours)
    • JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Certification (on-going)
  • EDX course in Java organised by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
    • IT.1.1-ESx: Introduction to programming with Java: programming basics
    • IT.1.2-ESx: Introduction to programming with Java: best practice in coding (on-going)
  • Linkedin Learning.
    • Become a Java Programmer
    • GIMP Essential Training
    • Become a Full-Stack Web Developer
  • DataCamp.
    • Web Scraping in Python
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