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I never thought I would become a Web Developer.

For the past 5 years I’ve been mostly in the business of Innovation Consulting but deep down I wanted to be a Tech Entrepreneur. There was something that didn’t feel right though:

How can I become a Tech Entrepreneur without any sort of tech knowledge?

We’ve seen stories like this possible. But this is something I didn’t want.
It felt like some sort of “impostor syndrome”. I decided to overcome that but I was scared for sure. I believed my career was very well paved already.

August 2019: first day of 6-months part-time Coding Bootcamp. Yey, so excited!

I think my current professional life is a bit unusual. One that my parents, at least my dad, thought would be very similar to his:

“Engineering career + Masters = stable job + increasing income + continuous company-paid learning + retirement fund + investments here and there… etc.”

I did some of that for some years and my career unfolded in something like this:

2008: Bachelor in Engineering, got a great job at Toyota.
2013: MBA, got promoted.
2016: moved to Berlin, got a second Master Degree, got an awesome job at Zalando.
2019: Entrepreneur.

With these series of events, 2019 became the year that I finally decided to learn programming with the goal of building a product valuable and useful for many people and ultimately redirecting my life to become a Tech Entrepreneur.

Let me share with you the fundamental questions I asked myself before embarking into this journey and how I answer them today, a year after:

1) “Isn’t it too late to learn to code? (A.K.A am I not too old for this (34 )?”
2) “Is it worth the investment in money and time?”
3) “Am I clear about what’s my ultimate goal?”

Here my answers and reasoning:

1) It wasn’t too late

But I gave it a couple of shots before I got it right. My first shot at learning to code was in early 2018. We’ve all been there (or at least I have).
It went like this:

Day 1:

“I’m so excited!
Finally I’ve signed up for my first free online coding course. Back to school!
I’m gonna learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript and get my first project off the ground!
And… FOR FREE! 🚀 ”

Day 30:

“I haven’t made so much progress. Is this getting me closer to launch my project?
Maybe I should commit myself a bit more. I’m gonna pay for this online course: more structured, several hands-on projects and a community to discuss my issues and get feedback. Great!🙌🏼”

Day 60:

“That didn’t go as I expected… My motivation melted down day after day.
I’m still waiting for answers of issues I encountered in some lessons. I’m lost.
It’s been two months: I’m bored, lonely and my project waned off! 😔”

During those early days I encountered the typical situations that made my learning experience quite hard:

• No pressure (from day 1).
• No community (at around day 30).
• No feedback (more pronounced after day 60).

So I eventually gave up. I lost my time and money and I couldn’t apply any of the new learning I gained during that time. I was devastated!

2019: The big decision.

I finally decided to take programming seriously and… Guilty! Learning to code took a toll on my newly funded company at a price of 6,500 EUR and the side effects of taking part of my time to learn and not growing the business. I sugar-coated it as a “Strategic Decision”.

I decide to join a Bootcamp due to those repetitive events above that make my learning experience tough, painful and frustrating. I needed a different approach to learning. So I took the plunge!

First answer: it wasn’t too late. And frankly it never is when it comes to learning something new. It was a matter of understanding where to start, who can guide me and how I can align my learnings goals with the proper learning environment, motivation and well… A pocket full of money!
That leads me to say:

2) It was worth the investment

I came to the realisation that I’m a person that is highly motivated by the pain of paying, that needs a clear goal, a defined deadline and people around me to help me out. If you’re like me, this is the kind of encouragement I need to execute and succeed at something. I’ve found that this sort of thinking yields a positive ROI (return on my time/money invested) from my actions.

I look at it this way (true story): I spend more than a thousand euros every year to run a marathon. I get some training gears, pay registration fees, accommodation, travel, etc. This pain of paying puts me in track for a positive return: more years of life by having a healthy lifestyle. In many situations in life I feel the need to put skin and money in the game to gain something back and you can see a pattern here with my learning approach: marathon completion (clear goal and date), more years of living (positive return and purpose) and my peers and support team (a community to help me succeed).

So why do I think was worth the investment?
Simple: positive ROI, and the answer to the second question.

My 6,500 EUR paid back right after the bootcamp by building projects, executing and acting upon my learning. The first one started a month after the bootcamp in which I built my first fully functional MVP to save a local business during the first days of the lock-down due to COVID-19.

It took me over a week to build this. It was a straight-forward online shop to sell shirts and vouchers but it gave me the chance to put in my practice my kind of learning environment:

• A clear challenge: save a local shop by building an e-commerce. At this point I only knew 60% of how to do this (how am I suppose to integrate a payment system? No clue back then).
• Clear requirements: landing page, catalog, product detail page, checkout, integrations with stripe and mail chimp and admin account.
• A clear deadline: two weeks (even more pressure due to lockdown uncertainty).
• Support, advice and feedback: ex-colleagues from Coding Bootcamp and Developer friends.

This investment allowed me to also get some more confidence. Even after the bootcamp, I struggled to call myself a Developer but now my portfolio can speak for myself. Here’s a little overview of how this product looked like:

Built with HTML/CSS/JS and Ruby on Rails. Github repo here.

So these investments pay off if you continue your learning journey, not if you stop it, and if you make sure that your financial return makes sense.

3) What are about the ultimate goal?

Sadly, bootcamps end. Sometimes learning does too when you don’t find the right project to work on. Also, unfortunately, you loose touch with your alumni community and you face the real world of thousands of other programming languages, technologies and frameworks. Many fail to come back to purely online learning and tutorial purgatory and there I am, once again feeling like in 2018: confused, alone and no clear goal in mind to what to do next.

I realised that in the end it’s not about joining a bootcamp and learning to code. It’s merely about building useful and functioning products for people and continue the learning journey. I did this bootcamp because of a clear reason: building a path for life-time learning.

So, what to do about it? Is there any solution for my “2018 feeling”?
The answer is YES!

I believe that there is a way to make this learning journey much better, less painful and less costly. It’s based on a hybrid method combining the best of both worlds: online courses and bootcamps.

Code-Nodes: in the intersection of the best of both worlds.

Third answer: This is the product we want to build for you.

We’ve coined it Code Nodes: a 100% remote community where self-learners and people in tech can connect, work and learn together while solving realistic coding challenges and work on real projects.

Code Nodes is a learning experience that is results-driven (aiming at working and usable software), peer-reviewed (for continuous skills’ improvement), supported (by mentors and accountability coaches) and most importantly affordable (assuring you get your positive return on investment).

In a nutshell it looks like this:

Code Nodes: our proposition to learning to code.

• Realistic projects get published by our platform with realistic deadlines to keep you going in your learning journey.
• Team-up with other community members to take your learning to the next level through feedback and peer review.
• An Accountability Coach and a Mentor helping you identify, discuss and overcome obstacles.

Does this resonate with you?

So, let me introduce you to Code Nodes.

You can sign up for our 25 slots for a lifetime access for 99 EUR and be the first one to work with us on your first challenges/projects along with your coding team, a mentor and your accountability coach.

Thanks for reading!

I hope it was useful and you become part of our community at Code Nodes. Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or directly to luis@fizzibl.com

Do you have a similar story like this? I’d love to hear it!.
Let’s jump on a call and talk about it! :)

Thank you!