Throughout my nearly all of my 30 years on this planet I have been in working in retail. I've done everything from working in customer service to being an operations manager and a few other jobs in between. I decided I was tired of being miserable and decided it was time to take the leap and start a coding career. I've been in love with coding since high school but for some reason I never considered it an option until know.
I was working in retail and the only thing my managers were good at was dangling the carrot. There was always a promise that something was about to happen and everything would be alright. I believed that line for a year and a half. A month and a half ago I quit my job and knew that I wanted to go to FlatIron Schools coding bootcamp in Denver. I had done a lot of research into which camp I wanted to attend. The choices of camps seemed endless and I was stuck between Flatiron, Turing, General Assembly, and a few others. The deciding factor for me was culture. Looking at instructor reviews of each bootcamp I found that most instructors hate their job. Being an instructor at a boot is hard. The hours are long and the curriculum is often intense and difficult. The reviews for Flatiron were different. The instructors liked the company which to me translates to they like their job and their students. Boy was I right.
The first day of the bootcamp we played the corny getting to know you games. As we played one of the versions of the "name game," I thought to myself how silly this was. But don't you know that by the end of it I knew every one of the seven instructors names and every one of the other seventeen people in my cohort.(we didn't include the other 2 cohorts in the game but I think 23 names in 30 mins is enough!) Next as a cohort we played 2 truths and a lie. Again, I thought to myself how corny this all was but I got into it. The instructors actually made it fun and even though we are all fully grown adults we all had fun playing these games. Immediately the cohort felt like a team. It feels like we skipped the 3 week awkward getting to know you period and just stepped right into being a team.
Team. That word is big here. Not only is it expected for you to work with your cohort and also the older cohorts, but it is necessary. We began working with ruby and the theory of back end programming. They are teaching ruby here but the language is only a means to an end. The true end is understanding what we are coding. It is to understand how enumerables and variables work. What each data type truly stores and means. They are teaching us the building blocks for every coding language that is out there. In terms of spoken language they are teaching us Latin. Once you learn the root of language it makes understanding the rest of the languages leagues easier.
The day to day has a lot of information but it hasn't seemed overwhelming yet. The amount of support I get from both instructors and other students is staggering. I'm excited for the next few weeks and working on my Mod 1 project in just 1 more short week. Fingers crossed it all works out but so far it has been one of the best decisions of my life.
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