DEV Community: Piper Bates

2 months gone... Life after School of Code

Piper Bates — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 22:35:12 +0000

It's increasingly hard to believe that the School of Code bootcamp for cohort 4 ended two months ago. Since my last post, I've learnt so much my brain at one point felt like an overstuffed suitcase, with knowledge hanging out of it like shirt sleeves and old socks. But brains are like muscles, you just need to work out a bit and your capacity for knowledge expands, and the School of Code is like an extensive gym subscription for your mind.

I've said before that School of Code was a life changing experience for me, and I don't even have a job in tech yet. I knew I loved to work in creative fields and I loved being an illustrator, but there was always something missing from it, it felt like I had stagnated a bit, and it wasn't just because freelance was 90% marketing. Working on projects on School of Code showed me that what I really love is team based creative problem solving. I've always admired creative teams like Pixar and Disney, watching their behind the scenes documentaries always made my heart hurt because I wanted that, and I thought that illustration and animation was how to get there. School of Code threw me into that exact same environment without me even realising that's what I was looking for, and without having a clue that you can get that experience in tech.

(PS. Demo day was an experience in itself and if you want to check out my teams presentation you should definitely go do that).

I spent the first couple of days after Demo Day in a state of shock, partially because suddenly there was no project to work on, there was no presentation to prepare for, we were able to just... stop. It was a strange transitional period from constant, directed learning to having far too much time on my hands. It was definitely good to give my brain a little bit of a break from the intensity that was the bootcamp (which, by the way, is called a bootcamp for a reason). But after a brief period of rest, it was time to get back on the horse. Learning never stops, and I have learnt from experience that learning is like riding a bike - you've gotta keep pedalling or it'll be hard to get started again.

Throughout the course I gravitated strongly towards more front end technologies; they made the most sense to me, and the back end took a lot of getting used to. This was probably unsurprising to most people - I come from an illustration background, so of course I would love front end, right? But I've had a fascination for the back end for years, and while my strength is absolutely in front end I want to grow and develop my back end skills to scratch that itch. I took my basic knowledge of Node.js and began building a Twitter bot. This was my first node.js only project, built essentially out of a lazy desire to not have to search through Twitter hashtags to find new artists on the app. Art Every Hour was born, a bot that uses the Twitter API to search once an hour for tweets containing the #art hashtag and retweets the latest one. This was probably my first time realising just how powerful APIs could be, as I'd only previously used them to interact with a front end and hadn't made the connection to more useful applications. It's funny how despite using the technology alongside React for a few months, I hadn't really understood its potential.

There have been more things I've been learning - I'm currently working on a freelance project alongside a few other School of Code graduates where we've had to learn how to use Shopify as well as learn Liquid from scratch, to edit a clients store. Doing these little side projects has been great not just because we're learning new technologies but because it's reinforcing everything we learnt at School of Code - how to work within agile teams, how to learn, and how to talk to clients.

Finishing an intense bootcamp and going out into the world on your own is intimidating to say the least, especially in this current landscape where the future is so uncertain. Life after School of Code could have been stagnant, boring, and unproductive, if I'd have let it. But one thing that is so important that School of Code has taught me above all else, is to stay connected. Self directed learning is hard and isolating, but there are so many supportive people out there who only want to help us grow and improve, and actually opening ourselves up to that support is one of the most important things we can do. Especially your fellow bootcamp ~~victims~~, sorry, cohorts.

Here's to constant and never ending growth!

Piper
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A Wild Piper Has Appeared!

Piper Bates — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 19:07:47 +0000

Humanity has always been excited and inspired by new beginnings. We love to read about how things began, the start of new adventures, the first step out the front door on a quest. Our minds leap into action, imagining how things will go, enthralled by what is yet to come. It's why we read stories, travel, and learn new things.

This is far from my first "new beginning" and won't be my last (humans are complicated creatures and life likes to throw curveballs when we least expect it), but it is still a fresh start for me, in many ways. It is a new door that is opening and new opportunities lie waiting. I'm excited.. and also terrified.

My coding journey really began as a teenager, because of a browser game called Neopets. The actual point of Neopets is to adopt cute and odd looking creatures (called Neopets) who you need to feed and groom and play games with. You could also build your pet it's own webpage within the game, and you could program them with HTML, and later CSS. Having a good looking pet page was a prerequisite to being one of the cool Neopet players, and so my awkward, nerdy teenage self decided I absolutely had to have one too, and taught myself as much HTML and CSS I could by taking the coding from other websites, editing it all in a Notepad file, and saving it as a .html file to see what had changed.

From there I was hooked, and started building websites, mostly for practice and to feel like I was building something for a purpose that other people could actually look at, instead of just writing random bits of code for fun. I bought a domain name and a friend with a server lent me some space to put it online. My first website outside of Neopets was a Linkin Park fansite where I uploaded pictures I'd drawn based on the song lyrics. It also had a link to my Livejournal and my Neopets account, because of course if you were interested in Linkin Park, you would absolutely be interested in the bizarre rambles of a hyperactive anime fan and their Neopets page. Unsurprisingly, nobody visited my website and I got bored of updating it after a while.

The next website I built was a place for me to upload all of my art and stories, a sort of art portfolio except it was doodles and sketches and bad poetry. I kept that website for years, changing the design every so often, mostly because I learnt a new trick in HTML and wanted to experiment. I also built a website for my mums business, something she still kept until just a few years ago - bearing in mind I built it in the early 2000s, I had to really twist her arm to convince me to modernise it!

People over the years suggested to me that I could, perhaps, use my coding skills for an actual career, but in my mind the only career I could see it being used for was website design, and while I enjoyed tinkering with the designs for my own websites, designing them for other people seemed a little overwhelming. The image I had of people actually working in code was based heavily on stereotypes, and all the people I knew who actually worked in code were men, and they were also people I didn't really get on with all that well. I assumed coding wasn't for people like me.

I've always been interested in illustration, storytelling, and animation and that's very much what I threw myself into. I wanted to be a part of a creative team, working together to solve problems, and I saw that primarily in the "behind the scenes" clips on the DVDs of my favourite movies. They inspired me to want to tell stories, to make people happy, to inflict them with the kind of emotions that I felt when I watched those films and read those stories. Illustration became a way for me to tell my own stories, and I self published a few of my own books, and then got a book traditionally published that I'd illustrated. I would, in many ways, consider myself a successful illustrator, but by my own definition of the word - I don't make enough to make ends meet most of the time, and I struggle to find work. I also find the work immensely isolating because it's very much solo work until I'm directly talking with a client. I miss that connection with other people. Because I've never made much money, I took jobs in retail, call centres, cleaning - anywhere that would have me, but I was never able to hold down a job for too long because doing the same thing day in and day out, never moving towards anything, and feeling thoroughly uninspired by the job took an unsurprising effect on my mental health. My CV is almost 4 pages long because of the amount of terrible jobs I've had, and had to leave.

Then, recently, I started meeting people who were working within the coding industry who were very much like me. Creative, silly, nerds who liked cartoons, and video games and had the same politics as me, and liked dressing up in silly costumes, and had my sense of humour. And were women, or non binary. Suddenly the industry seemed like something that wasn't just grumpy men sitting in dark smokey rooms on their own, making passive aggressive comments towards any non-men, it seemed like maybe it was... fun? Exciting? Liberating? Creative?

Which is how I found myself applying to the School of Code. I found a few different bootcamps around the UK, but the location made things difficult. A penniless artist with bills to pay + expensive travel and accommodation costs = Unfeasible. But the School of Code being free, and based in Birmingham which was much closer to me, was the answer I needed. I applied for cohort 3 immediately, made it through to the interview stage, and err, anxiety got the best of me and I fudged the whole thing. Rambled something about cheese, probably (I actually can't remember the interview and hopefully neither does the interviewer, it was embarassing). Surprising nobody, least of all me, I wasn't accepted that year, but was encouraged to try again next time.

So here I am, it's been a year (and what a year it's been...) and as soon as I saw the bootcamp was open for applications again I immediately applied. I got through the first, then second stage, managed to be much more articulate for the interview, and got accepted onto the 4th year of School of Code.

I'm excited, I'm nervous, I'm partially convinced everyone is going to immediately notice that I'm actually useless and send an email apologising for the mistake. The biggest excitement for me is how this has the potential to dramatically change my life. Job satisfaction has always been something that, to me, seemed laughable. I've never had a job I enjoyed, where I got to be creative and passionate and encouraged to learn or try new things. Every job I've had has been minimum wage or slightly above minimum wage, the concept of savings or being debt free is alien to me. To have a job that I enjoy, where I could afford to save, to travel if I want to, to actually support my family, is... I'm not sure if I have the words to express it, honestly. "Exciting" doesn't feel right, because that doesn't fit how utterly bizarre it would be.

This is my next first step towards that future. Maybe I'll trip up a few times, but I'm walking forwards to a life that makes so much more sense to me. Perhaps you're on this journey, too. Perhaps you've walked the path before me, or want to. Either way, keep reading these weird little blogs I'll be posting along the way. Maybe this new beginning will take me some place extraordinary.

Watch this space...

Piper x