Twelve months ago I had my first internship at a Fortune 500 company working in Customer Retention for one of the major Satellite TV companies. I was piloting a “Surprise and Delight” campaign for our “most valuable customers”.

In the process of trying to make my project come to life, I worked with my department’s Business Analysts. I watched them query the company’s massive databases and find the data I needed in order to learn who to target with my campaign. The analysts used SQL (Structured Query Language) in order to write a query that would return the exact sect of customers we needed.
After weeks of changing needs and waiting on simple requests, I learned two things.
I would rather be the one solving problems than waiting on others to solve them for me.
I realized that I did not just want to solve problems (because I believe that is the first line of ANY job description) but I wanted to solve problems with logic and with code. From a young age, I have always loved puzzles. When asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I always said that I wanted to solve puzzles for a living. At that time, I naturally thought that meant that I should train to be the next Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House. But seeing this code was such a poignant moment in my life because it showed me that I didn’t have to strive to be some fictional character in order to make a living from solving real world problems with my mind.
Later that summer, my project sent me to our Tech Office where all of our Software Engineers and Developers worked. As soon as I walked in I realize where I wanted to be. It felt like I stepped into a small sliver of the Google HQ. There were coworking spaces instead of cubicles, natural light rather than the faint glow of phosphorescent light bulbs, and a ping pong table for breaks. I sat down and interviewed a couple of the developers and none of them had a formal Computer Science degree but rather received their training from an institution called Galvanize which happened to be a coding bootcamp.
What is a coding bootcamp you may ask?
A coding bootcamp is a technical training program that teaches the parts of programming with the biggest impact and relevance to current market needs. … Most coding bootcamps last anywhere from 8–12 weeks and are designed for speed and high-impact learning.
From there I dove head first into the wonderful wide world of programming the world wide web. My story looked like many others, after work I would head home and spend as much time as I could on online tutorials such as CodeCademy and FreeCodeCamp. But I quickly learned that there was a huge gap between the hand-holding “type this code here” tutorials I was working through and programming complex software. I read this article by Erik Trautman and it helped me understand the journey ahead and what I was going to need to make it to the other side.
I struggled through the Cliff of Confusion and the Desert of Despair for many months as I waded through the helpful but overwhelming array of internet resources at my disposal. I realized that if I truly wanted to get serious about Software Development, I was going to need a real person rather than a computer screen to learn from. This is when I seriously started researching the efficacy and validity of coding bootcamps. My research led me to The Iron Yard, a well established and highly rated program with a campus in my city, Indianapolis. After completing their free Introduction to Javascript Course, they sent me my very own ultra-soft Iron Yard t-shirt. They had my attention.
After much research and deliberation, I turned down a job offer from a great home builder in town and decided to fully invest in programming and attend The Iron Yard Web Development Immersive Program. I start a week from today and I will be in the program for the next four months. I will be looking for employment starting in December and I am very excited for the next step in my career in tech.
