Codeworks Bootcamp: Week 1
Nine months after quitting my previous job as a Program Manager at Red Hat, I have landed in Barcelona on a very special mission: skill up for a career switch, find a software engineering job and make this city my new home.
The upskilling part will take place at the highly-acclaimed coding bootcamp Codeworks. I’ll attend their Software Engineering Immersive course, which aims at teaching full-stack JavaScript at a job-ready level in 3 months. This blog will serve as a place to share my impressions and observations from this unique experience.
I have spent the last nine month backpacking in Asia, where scams are abundant. It only takes a few bad experiences to develop a very high threshold to trust anyone and anything. So naturally, when I first heard about a study program that would get me job-ready within 3 months in exchange for a significant portion of my savings, my well-trained scam detector started blinking bright red. But after some hours spent reading online course reviews and verifying that reviewers are actual real people with impressive careers on LinkedIn, I was determined to give Codeworks a shot.
At the moment of writing this post I’ve gone through the first week of the course. If I had to sum the week up into one sentence, it would be: “Scam detector idle, this place is the real deal!”
I’m really impressed by the efficiency of the teaching method. The course is structured so that the majority of time is spent pair-programming assignments of progressively higher difficulty. The assignments are cleverly thought out: they snowball concepts learned in theory sessions and expose us to common pitfalls that most students encounter while tackling the subjects at hand. Instructors are readily available to get us unstuck or consult our approach to the problem, avoiding typical self-study frustration. This is where I see the high added value: many experienced coders dismiss coding bootcamps as a waste of money on something that can be learned for free through self-study. While I agree self-study can lead to the same results, it’s clear it would take disproportionately longer. And for someone like me who’s in their mid-thirties and prioritizes time-to-result, a bootcamp is turning out to be a really good choice.
Another thing I’m really impressed with are my co-students. Codeworks take great pride in being very selective in the admission process. The admission challenges are no joke and only around 5% of applicants make it to the course. But once you’re in, you see the benefits very quickly. Everyone in the cohort is really smart, highly-motivated and supportive of other students, creating a study environment like I haven’t experienced before; something completely different to what I was used to at a university. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be part of this group!
The pace is absolutely crazy. The official schedule takes 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, and many students choose to stay extra hours or even come on Sunday. I’m myself writing this blog post on campus on a Sunday afternoon, after a 3-hour revising session. There’s hardly any personal life or downtime, and there won’t be for the next three months. Last two nights I even had dreams about coding, which is a sign of my subconscious mind trying to make sense of the sudden information overload. But all that is a natural trade-off for the efficiency of the teaching method and something I’m completely at peace with.
Ultimately I have to say I’m actually having a really great time. After nine months of being completely commitment-free, it feels surprisingly great to have a set schedule, have an ambitious goal to work towards, and genuinely enjoy the whole process. Coding itself is becoming increasingly more fun and the prospect of it becoming an activity I’d get paid for is a fantastic motivation.
So on to week 2, I’ll keep you posted how it went and try to get into more detail about the technical content of the course.
