“I was constantly playing with mobile apps. I was learning what I could and couldn’t do just without any schooling,” says Ryan Backa. “I was like, ‘Okay, I still need to learn the syntax and everything.’ So, it got me pumped up to do it…and I [decided] to go to Full Sail.”

Today, Ryan develops apps for use across the sports industry as a Software Engineer with Texas-based developer Stack Sports. The Mobile Development grad’s current project has him working on an application used by teams in Major League Baseball. “[Teams] use it to watch film and prepare for their next day’s games; coaches can put quizzes in there for players and they can all communicate via the messaging inside the app,” says the grad.

An important part of Ryan’s role is something he refers to as “keeping code beautiful.”

“One of the things that I’ve been taught is to keep your code beautiful, so it has to be very readable,” he says. “If you can’t read the code, it makes it harder to follow what the code is doing, and it’s going to take a lot longer to either fix a problem or write new code that can interact with the code that’s already there.”

Recruited by Stack Sports based on his experience working with a different technology stack at a previous company, Ryan is certain his time at Full Sail was the perfect preparation for his current remote role.

“[Full Sail] helped a ton, especially the learning remotely. It definitely helped me get to where I am at Stack Sports, being able to work from home and everything,” says the grad.

“What they were teaching us was spot-on. If I didn’t go to Full Sail, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere close to being able to say, ‘Hey, it’s going to take me this long to do this project or fix this bug,’” he says. “[In school], they’d give me three different mini-projects that I would have to do in a week. And, at first, they seem very overwhelming and daunting, and then you get into it and you’re like ‘Oh, okay. I got this.’ And, it gave me the confidence to do well in the industry.”

Ryan encourages new grads to stay committed to the job-search process.

“I [was] searching for work about six months before I was done at Full Sail and then, probably, nine months after graduating,” he recalls. “Since then, I’ve had three different jobs in the four years since I graduated and each one was a step up from the one prior.”