I completed General Assembly’s Web Developer Immersive in 2016. Back then, the curriculum focused on Vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, raw Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node). At the time, everything moved at breakneck speed—and while we covered a lot, I don’t think the fundamentals ever had time to really sink in.
What I did admire was the program’s emphasis on building and deploying projects. You were thrown into the deep end—forced to wrestle with unfamiliar concepts and figure things out as you built. Pre-LLM, that approach made sense. You just pushed through and got something working. Whether that led to long-term understanding, though, was a different story.
It wasn’t until I enrolled in CSMC 203: Introduction to Programming at Montgomery College that things finally began to click. That foundational class helped me breeze through CSMC 206: Python Programming, and from there, everything felt more grounded.
Eventually, I transferred to the University of Illinois Chicago to finish my CS degree. Being at a large public university, many professors rely on autograders to evaluate code. Imagine your first programming project being run through HackerRank or LeetCode-style tests without ever really being shown how to solve a problem. It’s easy to see how that could be discouraging—maybe even enough to push someone out of the field entirely.
And UIC? They pile on the homework, especially in the engineering department.
There isn’t much space to breathe, let alone learn deeply, until the semester ends. I’ve been balancing work and school for a while now, and I finally have the time and mental bandwidth to prove what I’m capable of—not as a cog in an assembly line, but as a developer who builds with intention.
Over the coming months, I plan to build and share 12 projects that demonstrate why I’m a senior developer—and why I’m qualified for just about any role I apply to.
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I'm @jamal-chukwuka.bsky.social on bluesky.