Week 6 — Salesforce and Burn the Backend, a review of our week
The Iron Yard Academy has a LOT of connections. I’ve seen that amazingly through LinkedIn recently. It’s become this weird fascination I have through LinkedIn of seeing just who I know through a connection. Any connection I make in the tech community is either through Jessica (TIY) or through Jay (former boss). It’s a crazy tech scene in Indy.
All that being stated this past Friday we got to travel to Salesforce’s updated building, one of them anyway. I’ll put this right out there…a bit of a waste of time. Look they have great views in the building, they have a great product, great benefits, and a stocked social room that puts many places to shame.
But as a coding bootcamp grad…we’ll likely not get a job there as a developer. That became apparent fast. We’ll really need to bolster skills elsewhere before going to Salesforce. They’ve hired one person and he’s exceptional and well connected.
That being said…I want to work there.
Even if it’s something like a technical project manager. Then while working there I could do freelance stuff on the side and maybe one day migrate to development. Fingers crossed for down the road.
The past two weeks have been solely focused on backend development and to call it a great disaster for Cohort 8 would be polite.
At first I was like “YES!!!! I get this” and then that blew up in flames as I realized no…no I don’t get this. What I’ve seen from the other students is one of the two:
- Turn in every daily assignment whether completed or not on that day.
- Don’t turn in anything and work on the things we do know and just be drastically behind.
I fall into the former. Whether I completed it or not, the instructors have it in all it’s incompletion, poorly commented, and broken code. The main reason for that has been two weekly projects that just set us back a lot. The goal for the new weekly was to be able to learn along as the project and complete things daily to get them done. That sounds great. The problem is that the previous week’s project was ridiculously hard so most of us weren’t done with the project until Friday (before noon!) and some of us just kind of gave up and said “here’s what I’ve got”.
Friday brought up a good point by an associate instructor, we’ll likely never use Node for backend. It’s just uncommon. They definitely don’t want us to hate the backend so they showed us Ruby on Rails and we all collectively hated them. Instead of taking hours to install modules, create forms, create routes, etc. it’s auto-populated. Pretty hard to “like” the back end when you’re dealing with a pen and pencil to do calculus by hand and then two weeks later you can just open up your laptop and type in the algorithms and press enter.
All this being said…I’m actually leaning backend for my focus. I know more than half are looking at front end and if it were just today it would be me and one other person. Which is great for one on one sessions. I think the next couple of weeks will be really telling.