Coding Bootcamp — Halfway

Jacob Moore
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

I’m extremely fortunate. I’m putting it right out there. When I told my wife I wanted to do a coding boot camp she didn’t bat an eye at the idea. She’s been a rock this entire time and willing to do whatever I ask to ensure I can spend time working on projects to keep up the pace and be successful. I’m truly fortunate for her.

When I had been thinking about doing a coding boot camp, in some fashion, for over a year it had always been a “well when she’s done with grad school I’ll take a night class”.

A couple months had gone by and I looked into The Iron Yard and was a bit put off by it being an all day program for three months. That just wasn’t going to work for us. The second it became an option I decided to take the leap into action and do The Iron Yard. And it’s been…so many different things.


Challenges

So beyond the day to day challenges of figuring out just what I’m doing, coding bootcamps have additional struggles. The biggest and most prevalent for me is time. It’s a struggle to keep up with my work, see my wife, see my kid, and everything in between. I’ve worked with the instructors on how I should handle the course load and that’s been helpful but it doesn’t really help with handling seeing my family.

Another big one that I’ve adapted is breaking outside of my comfort zone some. For starters this Blog is public, and I’ve started to put it on LinkedIn. Which by the way LinkedIn gives you an insight as to who is reading your posts. Good to know I have CEOs and Executive Directors reading these posts about struggling to code. Really doesn’t help with any anxiety…

But I think it’s important actually and that’s why I embraced the challenge. I think it’s important to show passion, growth, and a desire to better oneself. Even if I don’t get a developer position after this it’ll be nice to look back and say “I wrote about my first hand experience and understand what being a developer is like”.


Additional Changes

Although it could go with challenge I wanted to take a moment to give a nod to The Iron Yard. A big thing they push is career development, networking, and professional growth. I’ve gone to a few networking events and met some great people. This is something I normally wouldn’t have done before so it’s an interesting change in pace and comfort levels.


Future

I know we have a couple more weeks of backend ahead of us and frankly the idea of choosing between the two has me perplexed. I mean I struggled through JavaScript and I’m struggling at the moment with Mongo/Mongoose. I’m hoping that when we get into SQL I’ll get a better attachment/idea of which way I’d rather go for the last four weeks.

After that, who knows. I have an idea for a project for after graduation and then hopefully the job hunt leads to something great.

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