I graduated from General Assembly Software Engineer Immersive Program this week. And there is a lot of mixed emotions I have now that it is done. First off I would like to say that attending the boot camp was the best decision I have made for my career. I have worked in multiple different industries before trying to tackle the world of development. And while I was able to learn a lot on my own, attending the boot camp really gave me the direction and discipline to continue being successful on my own.
There is an entire world that has just opened up for me and the skill to pick up a new language and build a simple app in just a few weeks is a skill I will cherish for the rest of my life. I did not expect my culinary skills to be so transferable to software development, but I constantly find myself using the skills I learned in a kitchen to problem solve problems in my apps. I loved figuring out different techniques and which ingredients I could use to improve a dish and now I love figuring out different ways to write an app to improve performance and overall design. The first project I will learn on my own will be a basic blog app in Vue.js and the same app in React.
I am also excited to learn about things like Gatsby and CSS libraries like LESS and SASS. These are all things they did not teach us about in the boot camp, but I do not know if I would have been motivated to learn them without the discipline it gave me. And there is so much more out there I can not wait to find out about!
Some great podcasts I have found have been:
- Syntax FM
- Ladybug
- CodeNewbie
Some other great resources I will continue to use are:
- FreeCodeCamp
- Pluralsite
- CodeCademy
- CodeWars
And general social media and places to talk about code are:
- Twitter @GabrielSharpton
- Stack Overflow
- Medium
- Dev.to(Obviously ;)
I would love any suggestions you all have found that has helped you on your coding journey! Feel free to reach out to me to talk about all things code. And if you are interested to follow my journey check out my Github at
All in all, I am very excited to join the Dev community so look out world! You have a new member joining your ranks.
Top comments (5)
Congratulations!!!
I also attended a coding bootcamp and was surprised how transferable my econ skills/knowledge were. In terms of being able to think of a "system" and see the different parts and how they interact with each other and also influence the outcome.
So cool you said cooking skills. What made your cooking skills transferable?
I would say using skills to solve problems and testing solutions transferred over. I found myself constantly testing things like, how much salt to add to a recipe or if I can incorporate basil to bring out x flavor. In coding, I test out different ways to make functions in javascript and finding new ways to filter to increase productivity. And cooking always had me looking at the end product of a dish(or my application I am working on) and finding out what methods or ingredients(algorithms and datatypes) work best and still get the same end result. Unfortunately with cooking, I can't just "git revert" to my previous measurement lol. But the creativity I learned from cooking has really helped me out as well!
What were some of the skills you found transferable in your previous econ background? I always find it interesting to find the correlation between different industries!
Haha that would be great “ooo too much salt let me git revert that” 😂
That is super cool though. It sounds similar to how my econ degree/thinking transferred. Thinking of a system input and outputs. How can I change the inputs to get the desired output or how could I use different inputs to get the same output. How the inputs interact with each other.
Systems thinking is what I would consider it. But also aside from any skill transfer I believe you need to have a general interest “how things work”. Sounds like you do!
Congratulations again!!!
Why do you want to make the same app in Vue and React?
would like to know your thoughts on this.
It would just be interesting to find out how to do things in different languages and for practice mostly. They seem pretty similar but I would like to see what their strengths and weaknesses are. And to see which language I prefer, maybe there is a better way to go about that but it seems like a fun experiment.