Also, I want to make it clear that Dev Point Labs did not request that I write about my experience at their course or anything like that, this is my 100% honest and genuine feedback and experience.

Backstory

I had considered attending a dev school since I graduated from college Spring of 2016. I minored in Computer Science but when I graduated I didn’t feel anywhere near ready to start applying for developer positions. I worked at a digital marketing agency for a couple of years and got some experience messing with CSS and some WordPress development, but then I took a job doing fulfillment at Podium. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to be doing with my career at that point. This new job basically consisted of me installing software on old outdated Window’s Servers all day. Not really my dream job, but I did get to work on an amazing team and I learned a lot about how API’s work.

When I started this fulfillment job, I quickly realized that I wanted to be coding, and not talking to customers all day as a technician. I started exploring dev schools around my area. The two biggest coding schools in Utah are probably Dev Mountain and Dev Point Labs. I ultimately decided to explore Dev Point Labs because they were based in SLC — close to where I was living — and also it was much cheaper.

I knew that I didn’t need to attend a coding school to get a developer job, but I just couldn’t buckle down and dedicate several hours a day to improve my coding. So I knew a structured class would basically force me to do so, and I figured it would take me much longer to learn the skills necessary to land a developer job if I was solely learning on my own.

I signed up for an after-hours course at Dev Point Labs which meant I would be attending from 6–9 PM, Monday — Thursday, and then homework all weekend. I knew it would be rigorous, but I was excited to get started (also, terrified). I kept my job at Podium during this time. The plan was to do the course and then hopefully have enough experience to land a software engineering position at Podium. I talked to the CTO at Podium and he thought it was a great idea, and my manager was on board as well.

The Course

Going into the course, I knew I would be learning Ruby and JavaScript, and specifically Rails and React. I had a little experience with JS but that was it. I had never touched Ruby or React at all, and I had no knowledge of MVC frameworks or OO programming or anything like that.

The course started pretty slow. Since I had a background in computer science from my minor and I had played around with HTML and CSS, the first week was pretty boring. Mostly it was how to install packages on your machine, what a variable is, etc. If I wouldn’t have had a background, it would have been challenging from day one.

Once we started diving deeper into Ruby, the class got challenging very fast. I felt like I kept up, but I was spending 1–2 hours after class going over class content and homework, and then about 4–6 hours on both Saturday and Sunday working on projects.

We spent about 3 weeks on just Ruby (no framework or anything), and then started diving into Ruby on Rails. I was so lost those first few days of Rails. Like I mentioned before, I had no experience with an MVC framework so everything was going over my head. However, I asked lots of questions and did the homework and suddenly things started connecting. We did a hackathon about 5 weeks in and had to build a project using Rails that covered all the CRUD actions. It was a Saturday from 9 -5 PM. My group basically built a knockoff Reddit, and although it was challenging, we ended up winning. Not everything made perfect sense but we were able to build a fully functional app in just a day. Pretty awesome.

About 5 or 6 weeks in we shifted to React. I loved learning React. I knew I leaned more towards frontend going into the class so I just absorbed myself in learning the framework. Looking back, we didn’t really discuss vanilla JS at all, we basically just went straight into React. I don’t think this is a great way to learn programming since we had no background on the actual language we were using, we were just learning how to use the framework. But, it was really cool seeing how much I could build with only a little React knowledge.

We spent the rest of the class learning React and how React works with Rails to build a full-stack application. We spent a couple of days on CSS, API’s, Flux and a couple other concepts, but mostly we stuck with React and Rails basics. The last two weeks or so consisted of our final project, which we did in teams. My team built a new website for a Chinese restaurant, and we also built an interactive menu that the restaurant owner could use to add/delete items and edit pricing and everything.

We were pretty proud of what we accomplished. Here’s a link but I can’t guarantee this project will stay live. I ended up building most of the menu components and structured the database. Other team members worked on the login/admin stuff and one person did most of the styling.

The launch day was fun, it was a chance to show off our project to family and friends while also meeting other developers and people in the local tech scene. Then, it was just all over and time to find a job.

Post Dev Point Labs

The week after I graduated, I began the software engineering interview process at Podium. This consisted of building an app and showing it to them, writing algorithms on a whiteboard in front of some engineers, and a code review. It was intense, and unfortunately I didn’t get the job (I made it to the final interview and then received a “no”). I had put all my eggs in that one basket so I was pretty bummed out. I hadn’t even applied anywhere else. I was also pretty upset just because a few of the engineers at Podium told me I had the job and were impressed with my hard work, but then I was told they were going to hold off for now.

Looking back, I’m glad. I started applying other places, and after a couple of interviews, I accepted a job as a front-end developer at Clearlink, where I’m currently working. I’m very happy where I’m at and I couldn’t be more thankful for the opportunity to be working here.

Overall Thoughts on Dev Point

I loved going to Dev Point Labs. The instructors were great, I made some awesome friends, and I learned a ton. I felt like I had a solid grasp on React by the time the class was over. Right out of the class I probably wasn’t quite prepared for a job, but after a few weeks of working on my own projects I did feel ready to apply for developer jobs.

Things Dev Point Labs did well:

— Good instructors that are willing to answer questions and put in extra work to help

— Made difficult concepts easier to understand through examples and using simple terminology.

— Fun events and a cool office/classroom that made it easy to learn.

— Good curriculum that stretched me but wasn’t too overwhelming.

Things Dev Point Labs did NOT do well:

— Career preparation was pretty awful. They did like a 30-minute course on resumes and a 30-minute course on LinkedIn. No mock interviews, preparation for job search, etc. I didn’t really mind since I was already working in tech and felt comfortable interviewing in those positions, but I would have loved for them to go over whiteboard interviews — cause they’re grueling and terrible, but most companies do them anyway.

— Going into enough depth on topics. Sure we covered Redux, Sass, ES6, and React-Router, but I would have preferred to learn more in-depth on topics like JS fundamentals, algorithms, data structures and other core concepts. I can learn Sass and other frameworks on my own.

— Follow up hasn’t been that good. There’s a Slack channel for alumni but it’s mostly just students talking. I would have appreciated more support from the owners and instructors while job searching.

Do I recommend it?

This totally depends. If you’re serious about becoming a developer and you’re willing to put in the extra time involved, then yes, I think it’s definitely worth out. Out of my cohort I think there are only two other people that actually stuck with coding after the class (and we all have jobs as developers). We were also the three putting in the extra work and asking questions in class.

I think a lot of people think they’ll just get through a 3-month dev bootcamp and then have 15 job offers for $75,000+ the day after graduating. The current market is SO saturated with junior developers. There are overwhelmingly more junior developers looking for jobs than there are actual junior dev roles. You have to be willing to put in extra work and effort to actually get hired, and definitely don’t expect that salary right out of the course. You did a 3-month course, not a Master’s in CS.

I would recommend Dev Point Labs in particular, but I also have heard great things about Lambda School and would suggest looking into that if you want a more in-depth class that spans 6 months and covers more CS fundamentals.

Final Thoughts

I’m glad I went through Dev Point Labs. I feel like this experience moved me into a dev role much faster than if I would have just done tutorials and followed curriculum on FreeCodeCamp (which is an awesome resource by the way). I also loved being able to ask questions and learn from some talented developers.

If you’re considering a coding school, I say go for it as long as you’re dedicated and willing to put in extra time. It’s insanely difficult and time consuming — I basically committed three months of my life to the course. So make sure you have that expectation.

Also, get your feet wet first and make sure you actually like coding. Take some courses on Codecademy and try building a couple websites or basic apps before actually signing up. It seemed like a few people from my cohort did the course and realized in the first 3 weeks they hated coding. I heard people in y class talking about how they were dreading the hackathon and final projects…but that was the fun stuff to me cause we were actually building something.

If you have any questions, I’d be more than happy to help. You can find me on Twitter or you can email me at coltenvantussenbrook + @ + gmail.com.

Code on!

Now, it’s 2017 and I just finished writing my first WordPress plugin from scratch. I used PHP, JavaScript, Vue.js, HTML, CSS, and jQuery and several other technologies. Yet, I still wonder if I’m considered a developer.

(If you’re already bored, scroll to the bottom where I’ve thrown together a TL;DR paragraph. Or if you’d rather avoid a really nerdy article about coding.)

After my basic — and I mean basic — HTML course in 2013, I wanted to learn how to actually code rather than just writing some markup that could show up in a .html file.

I took an HTML & CSS course through Codecademy, and tried to build some simple websites. However, school work was demanding and in the technical writing program at USU, there was very little opportunity for coding (I hope this changes in the future with the tech comm program). In addition, I was working a couple of jobs to help pay for school and rent. So, learning to code got put back on the back burner until I decided to change my minor from marketing to computer science.

Computer science is a much different program than what I was used to. I was all of a sudden surrounded by some of the smartest kids at the university, and many of them had been writing code since they were 14. Several students in my intro to CS class had built entire programs from scratch. I had written probably 30 lines of basic HTML in my entire life. I was behind from day one.

I quickly learned that the CS program required hours upon hours of homework and learning. Before any of my CS courses, probably the most time I had spent on an assignment in college was 2, maybe 3 hours. Now in my intro to CS class, I was spending over 5 hours on coding assignments. In my second CS class, I had coding projects that took me 10+ hours to complete.

It was incredibly hard, and most the time I felt like I was just staying afloat rather than actually learning how to code. When I entered the program, I thought I would be learning how to build websites. Instead, I was learning how to implement binary search trees in C++. Sure, that was useful for the kid that was on his way to becoming Google’s next software engineer, but for me, it was just way over my head.

By the time I was in my final computer science class as a senior, I didn’t feel like I knew anything about coding. A lot of this was due to imposter syndrome. I realize looking back that I did create a solid base for learning programming, but I just felt way behind everyone else in my class. That’s what happens when you start comparing yourself to everyone around you.

To make a long story a littler shorter than it needs to be, I did eventually get my minor in computer science. I took 6 computer science classes and learned C++, Java, and got a tiny taste of JavaScript . When it was all said and done, I felt really accomplished getting that minor. I spent more time on my minor than my major in my last 2 years at USU, and I gained a ton of respect for anyone majoring in CS. Seriously, if you’re a CS major, I applaud you and also I’ll tell you good luck if you’re just starting out.

Many times during my degree, I had the thought “there is no way in hell I want to code for a living. I hate this.” However, every time I would stop coding and think about pursuing something else, I would almost instantly want to start writing code again. It was weird, and addicting for some reason. I can’t even really explain it, but if you’re a programmer, you’ll get it.

And here’s the craziest thing about it. I’m not that good at coding. It’s hard. In fact, one might even say I suck at it. I cringe at the words data structure and linear search, even though those are fundamental ideas in computer science. I get confused quickly and I doubt myself over and over again. I get stuck on a problem and want to give up. I’ll look something up on Stack Overflow, look through someone else’s code, and think to myself “I have no idea what any of this means”.

However when my code finally compiles and I figure out the problem at hand, I feel like a genius and I start looking for recruiting emails from Facebook’s engineering department. It’s a pretty cool feeling when your code works like you want it to and you look back and realize you built the entire thing. Building something from the ground up that you had an idea for is pretty thrilling (is this article nerdy enough yet?)

I still feel really inadequate at times when it comes to web development. Yeah I feel really confident with HTML and CSS and I’m comfortable piecing together some jQuery to get a website to function right. And yeah, I’m starting to figure out PHP to the point where I can write a script to write to a database. But I still feel lost, a lot. And you know what, that might not go away for awhile.

I almost went through a coding bootcamp so that I could graduate and finally call myself a “developer” and feel good about it. In fact, I did sign up for an online coding school called Bloc. I paid a deposit and had a start date picked out. And it was not cheap. However, I know that even upon graduating from one of these programs, I’d still have feelings of doubt and inadequacy.

Instead of going through with Bloc, I decided to look at other options. First, I talked with my boss. Lucky for me, I have an awesome boss that understands that in order to keep employees happy, you need to allow them to grow in a position. I sat down with him and explained where I was at with my career and what I wanted to do next. He told me that he would be happy to help me fill more of a developer role at the company rather than just designing WordPress websites with a prebuilt theme, which is what I’ve been doing at Kite Media. I’d probably be considered a web designer and digital marketer more than anything.

I expressed to him that I’d like to actually develop themes and plugins from scratch, rather than just using a prebuilt theme for everything. So essentially, I’d be writing all the code for custom themes and plugins. He was really cool about it and said he’d love to make that happen. This would of course help the company as well since we could offer more custom options when it comes to building websites and plugins for our clients. Instead of saying, “here are some of the websites we’ve built”, we can say, “tell us anything you want for your website and we will build it from scratch.”

I still have the responsibility of building websites for our clients, and I’m still using prebuilt themes and plugins for the most part. A big reason for this though is convenience and making sure our clients get a solid result. I do write quite a bit of CSS in a child theme, and I jump on any opportunity I have to tweak some WordPress functions.

But now with every spare second I have at work, I’m putting time into building custom plugins/themes for clients, or learning more about PHP and JavaScript. And if I’m not doing that, I’m reading an article about WordPress theme development or watching a video on Treehouse.

In the last two months or so that I’ve been in this position, I’ve learned more about coding than I did in the previous 4 years of just dabbling. The biggest reason for that is now I’m building real projects rather than just getting me feet wet. The difficulty comes with me being the only developer — there’s that word again — at my company, so I am basically on my own when I run into questions.

So have I made it?

Am I developer? Does building a WordPress plugin and writing some PHP scripts make me a developer? Does knowing ‘if else statements’ and ‘arrays’ allow me to put down ‘JavaScript’ as a skill on my resume?

The more I’ve thought about it, the fact that I’m writing code, building projects, and constantly thinking about how to make a certain app work, make me realize that I’m more of a developer than I realized. Maybe my problem is more that I’m not sure the exact point when you go from student to developer.

And maybe the biggest reason for that is that point doesn’t exist. Programming is a never ending learning experience. You’ve never reached a point where you know everything. And if you do feel like you’ve mastered something, wait a week and a new framework or even an entirely new programming language will be made available.

So for now on, yeah, I’m calling myself a developer. The 20-year software engineer on Stack Overflow who knows ASP.NET, C++, Python and Linux might get upset about that, but I just wrote over 1,000 lines of code in a week. So dammit, I’m calling myself a developer.

TL;DR

I sometimes feel awkward calling myself a developer because I have SO much to learn still. Imposter syndrome gets me down. But, what do I do? I write code. I think like a programmer. I build stuff. So yeah, I’m calling a developer.

Gordon was starting to look like a promising figure for the team to build around, so us Jazz fans stayed hopeful.

My good friend Richard and I were up at Utah State during this painful year. We watched every game that year, sitting around my crappy 20" box tv that I had had for 10 years. We were fueled by Totino’s party pizzas and Dr. Pepper. However, night after night, we were disappointed as John Lucas III, who I think is the worst PG to ever put on a Jazz uniform, would throw the ball away over and over again. It would take the Jazz 9 games to finally get their first W, and at the 16 game mark, they were 2–14.

Rudy Gobert had been drafted at this point, but he was just a clumsy 7 footer who couldn’t catch the ball yet. There was promise in Derrick Favors, Alec Burks and Trey Burke (we all know how that turned out), but the one guy that gave all Jazz fans hope was Gordon Hayward. He looked like he was ready to take his game to the next level.

For the next couple of years, Richard and I continued watching the Jazz. They were really bad, but we still planned our lives around the Utah Jazz. We paid over $100/month for a ridiculous cable subscription even though the only thing we wanted to watch was Jazz games. If one of was wanted to ask a girl out, we’d make sure there wasn’t a Jazz game the night of the date. We would buy cheap tickets and drive from Logan to Salt Lake on a Tuesday night just to watch them get killed by the Thunder, or the Rockets, or the Clippers. We were fanatics, but we believed.

Through this rebuild, the one thing keeping us sane was the idea that Gordon Hayward would eventually lead the Jazz to the playoffs and they’d become a threat once again. Last year, Gordon Hayward did it. He led a team that was once run by John Lucas III, and turned it around and led them to the second round of the playoffs.

If Gordon Hayward leaves, the whole rebuild was in vain. All those frozen pizzas we consumed, the money we graciously handed over to Comcast in order to get Root Sports, the Jazz apparel and tickets we purchased, it will all feel like it went to waste.

Gordon is the Utah Jazz rebuild. Why would he leave when the dark days are finally over? Why would he trade being a Utah legend just to play in Boston for a few years with a ball hog point guard and a big man that isn’t even in the same tier as Rudy Gobert? Why would he choose Brad Stevens over the astute Quin Snyder? Gordon belongs in Utah, where he suffered through a 25-win season and then turned that into a promising playoff run just this past season.

The Utah Jazz are ready to be elite. Please Gordon Hayward, you’re our only hope.

Colten Van Tussenbrook, a hopeful Jazz fan.