Kavitha Prakash

Treehouse offers a wide variety of courses that will provide the perfect platform to launch your ideas… Start with Treehouse and let your ambitions guide you.

What work were you doing when you first joined Treehouse & what encouraged you to learn with us?

I was a stay at home mother of three boys prior to joining Treehouse in November 2014. My background is finance. I worked as a finance analyst for Intel till 2003 prior to having children. I have always been fascinated with programming. Even as a finance analyst I would dabble in writing short programs with a simple user interface in Access to automate financial reporting processes for my team.

I am recently divorced and looking to enter the workforce once again to support my kids and myself. This time I decided to restart my career as an app developer. A friend suggested that I take some courses from Treehouse.

You chose to focus on learning to build apps. Tell us a little about why you chose this Track and what you've accomplished since learning with Treehouse.

I chose to build apps because I wanted to create something tangible that my children can use and even help me design. My children love playing games on my iPhone so I thought that would be a perfect place to start. I started with the “Swift Basics” course and then proceeded on to the “Build a Simple iPhone App with Swift” course. These two courses were enough to inspire me to design an educational app for children. In less than 4 months, I learned Swift, designed, created and successfully deployed my app that features multiple view controllers, sound effects, and changing graphics to the app store. I was even able to involve my children by having them help with the design. They chose colors, sound effects and even got to be my official quality testers. They are very excited to see the app and their design choices in the app store.

What has the value of a Treehouse education meant to you?

Outside of programming classes in school over a dozen years ago, I have very little programming experience. With just a few courses on Treehouse, I was able to pick up Swift and deploy an app within 4 months. Swift is a very intuitive language for beginners and the Treehouse lectures enabled me to conceptualize essential concepts and execute my ideas. In just 12 short hours, they cover core programming concepts and provide several exercises that effectively reinforce those concepts.

What are your plans for the future, and what’s up next on your learning path?

I am currently working on a new app that will teach children sight word reading and recognition, and possibly on a business app as well.

You can visit my website www.beedoapps.com for more information.

Is there any advice you’d like to share with new Treehouse students, who are just getting started?

If you are interested in learning iOS programming, look no further than Treehouse's Swift course. Treehouse offers a wide variety of courses that will provide the perfect platform to launch your ideas. By taking courses from Treehouse, you will get plenty of examples and exercises that will allow you to learn hands-on. Build on these exercises by extending them and use other sites like Google and Stack Overflow as a supplement. This will help you get a firm grip of the core concepts presented in the course and of the programming language in general. Start with Treehouse and let your ambitions guide you.