Self-teach => Bootcamp => Pro /Oliver's journey/

#career #100daysofcode #motivation #webdev

Hi coders!

This is a series of articles about my journey of becoming a software engineer.

A quick intro before I get started:

 let oliver_feher = {
    age: "27",
    location: "Raleigh, NC",
    role: "Software Engineer",
    languages: "Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, JS, React",
    experience: "8 months",
    learning_method: "self-teach + boot camp",
    boot_camp: "Flatiron School"
}

My background:

I came from the aviation industry, I was an operations manager at a top tier airline. It was an amazing job, however, I've never felt that I was able to satisfy all the creativity, curiosity in me. I've always spent a lot of time with my computer, building my PC, playing video games, or editing videos with Adobe AE. I remember when I was in elementary school I built a website for my class using only MS Word. Long story short, I quit my job and I spent about 8 months self-teaching myself front-end technologies.

Why boot camp, why Flatiron ?

In my honest opinion, anybody can learn how to code, it is just a matter of time. I believe a human's most precious gift is time. They offer a 5 months immersive path (50-60hrs/week), along with an income share agreement, and a team of coaches and instructors.

It doesn't matter what boot camp you graduate if you don't have the soft skills (teamwork, work ethic, adaptability, communication), and the ability to build a network. I came with a mindset of doing whatever it takes, to make the most out of these five months. I'm reading books on the side, practicing on HackerRank , trying to be active on platforms like dev.to and Medium, etc.

The first week:

Since I spent most of my time pre-boot camp learning JavaScript (including React and Node), HTML, CSS my expectations of the difficulty of the first week's material were low. We started with Ruby then will move onto Rails. Ruby is a different language (CLI) than JS, different syntax but the same logic. I went through the content made sure I had a deep understanding of the fundamentals. In my opinion, once you know a language, you will learn the rest of them much easier. I spent most of my free time connecting with- and helping others via Zoom and Slack. Not only I was able to help my classmates understand the syntax or the logic, but I practiced teaching/explaining code or I was just talking about code in general. The community is very diverse (just a few countries to mention: UK, India, Jamaica, US, Spain), and I had the opportunity to connect with a lot of great people. Basically built a "talking on a daily basis" relationship with the guys who share the same mindset.

Here is little exercise we had:

Create a method that checks if the entered number is prime or not
Try to implement an algorithm
See my solution below:

Moving forward:

The school is from Monday to Friday, so on the weekends, I will continue to work on my side-projects and mastering the newly learned material. I am very excited to see what next week brings. I will post on a weekly basis about my experience and progress. If you are thinking about committing yourself to a boot camp, or just a software engineering roadmap, stay tuned!

I will see you guys next week!
Olly