Me, Myself, I — An Introduction
Hey there, my name’s Morgan. Let me first start off by telling you a little about myself. I’m a web developer currently enrolled in a coding bootcamp called the Viking Code School. I’ve had an interest in software engineering for quite a long time now, but I’m finally at a point where it makes sense to take the next step. While most of what I do these days consists of alt-tabbing between Hacker News and Emacs, during more “normal” times of my life I consider myself a dedicated movie fan, book reader and (sometimes) soccer player. As for the future, I have hopes of starting a company some day, but in the mean time I settle for concerning myself with all things “entrepreneur.”
On to the point of the post — I’ve been “learning to code” for quite a while now. I put that in quotes, because I mean the phrase loosely. You see, the first time I ever decided to learn to code was probably something like five or six years ago, when I was still in high school. I had decided to start off with none other than Python. I made the obligatory hello-world program and some other basic ones, like a fibonacci number generator. I remember feeling elated at my newfound ability to write incantations, er, programs — It felt like magic, being able to get the computer to do work for me like that.
From there, I’d get the urge to “learn to code” again every year or so. As I’m sure some of you can relate, time and motivation weren’t always in abundance. It’s a fairly common trope on the internet that learning to program is hard, and it proved to be no different for me. And so over the intervening years I would pick it back up, each time going a little further and learning a little more than the previous attempt.
My most recent attempt has played out a little differently, however. Around February of this year I decided to get serious about this coding thing, and quit my job to focus on learning full-time. I knew that I wanted to attend a coding bootcamp, but costs were a definite factor for me. When I came across Viking Code School I knew it was my ideal candidate. VCS features deferred tuition until you get a job (like App Academy, if you’ve heard of it) and also remote-access, both of which are right up my alley.
For a few weeks, the only things on my mind were methods and iterators in preparation for the coding tests and interviews. As it turned out, I had prior experience with the required language, Ruby, so that was a plus. Stress became a factor, as I was sold and wanted to attend VCS very badly, but in the end I pulled through.
Which brings me to now. My cohort is set to begin July 5th, and I couldn’t be more excited to get started. Between the prep work I’ve been given and all the interesting material I’ve been covering on my own, I’ve been buried up to my ears in learning materials. I’ve discovered this incredibly interesting (family of) language(s) called Lisp and also a book titled the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I’m especially excited about both of these, because for some reason or another, anytime they’re brought up in online discussions it’s done in the ‘net-equivalent of a reverential whisper.
So, that’s me. I intend to keep posting throughout my upcoming journey to become a web developer. VCS covers technologies like Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and a couple of the newer JS frameworks, and I’m sure that I’ll be posting quite a few write-ups on these and other sorts of technical topics. So whether you’d like to follow along for the sake of your own education, or you’re just interested in what these newfangled “coding bootcamps” are all about — I intend to post about my adventures in this land-of-code every other Friday between now and the end of October. See you around!