After a very intense two months, my spring-to-finish for the Flatiron School Full Stack Online Software Engineering Program is finally coming to an end. It feels surreal, as I have been working very intense and very long hours to finish the program before its legacy learning platform retires, in part to make up for the previous months where I did not devote as much time to the program as an online self-paced student. Although these past two months has been challenging, it feels amazing to be able to go through the amount of lessons, labs, projects, materials, study groups, and learning a ton along the way. As the program is ending, here are some of the things I have learned from the program:
Compared with before I started the program, where I only knew HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript, I now know Command Line, Git, Ruby, Sinatra, Rack, Rails, SQL, ActiveRecord, more HTML, more CSS, Rails, more JavaScript, React, Redux, etc. It's pretty incredible how the program helped me learn so much in such a short amount of time, and can actually use what I learn to build functional web applications. If you are new to programming or a beginner, I would highly recommend you join a bootcamp if you want to jumpstart on programming, and start building projects. I also learned the importance of your environment and tools. Setting up the right environment and installing the right tools is essential to programming. To me it is the single biggest barrier to entry to any one who wants to learn programming. I actually feel that your software/tech/app stack and your environment, and using the right ones and the right version of the right tool to use is more important than the coding, because the right tools can help you so much and save you so much time.
In addition to learning technical skills and concepts, I also learned many other things that are not only essential programming but also in general: 1) ask a lot of questions - be curious and ask questions, this is the best way to fully understand and learn something; 2) Google - the internet is an amazing place, you can find almost everything on anything, there are a ton of good resources, materials, articles, videos on every aspect of programming, it's a wealth of knowledge ; 3) use forums like Stackoverflow - chances are, any issues or bugs that you have, someone else had them too, or similar ones. Stackoverflow has a ton of great answers to questions and solutions to bugs and issues ranging from the most simple and common ones to very complex ones; 4) test-driven development - build your projects and products using test-driven development, because it set up targets and parameters for what your project can do, and measure your code according to it. And it might be counter initiative, but fail fast is the quickest way to build a project.
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