BU student works with Silicon Valley technology experts

Digital Media Design student Tim Stone, from Bournemouth University, is helping Silicon Valley experts to create mobile phone software tutorials.

After being tasked with building a mobile application for his second year project, student Tim Stone began by planning his project on GitHub, a code storing site that anyone can see.

Tim decided to challenge himself and go for the hardest learning framework, called Sencha Touch. In order to learn and develop his app project Tim posted on the discussion forums regularly attaining feedback and advice on his project from other community members.

“It was fairly hard to learn, the deadline was tight and my ambition was high. I found myself posting to the Sencha Touch forums fairly often, as all of my work was open source I could link to this and others could see the whole project and get to grips with what I was trying to achieve,” said Tim.

It was this call for help that prompted Nick Poulden, an Engineer at Sencha, Inc, to get in touch with Tim, impressed by his skill and he asked Tim to write some tutorials for the website.

“We found Tim had written a tutorial on Sencha Touch on his blog and it was great quality. I invited Tim to contribute to our official documentation as the more tutorials we have, the better for our community of developers.”

Tim has now written nearly  five tutorials for Sencha, and says that the experience has been both challenging logically but rewarding as all of his work is being shared online, being seen by many and is helping other people who were once in the same clueless position as himself.

“It’s been a fantastic learning experience, I’ve got to grips with JavaScript and Ext, learnt the pain of American business forms and made some brilliant contacts — the only downside is having to write in American English!”

Course lecturer Mark Shufflebottom spoke of Tim’s success, “Tim's provision of documentation for this Silicon Valley technology company obviously demonstrates the high level of skills that students attain whilst studying at BU.”

• BA (Hons) Digital Media Design