What code brought new into my life
It’s crazy the amount of people that nowadays decide to take the leap and make a huge change with the way their life is going. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not that we make bad decisions — we make them late.
One year ago I was paying the toll for not making a clear decision about my career. I had just settled into the first job that allowed me to pay for my hobbies, but which eventually stopped being challenging, exciting and (most importantly) rewarding. It was a job that I knew how to do and that I did well — and, as it was the easiest choice to make, I was not willing to change… Until the stress became a reality and I realized I was still the same person I was three years ago: I had a plan in mind when I started, yet I hadn’t accomplished anything at all (well, I did adopt a wonderful loving cat, but that was something that just happened along the way).
And so, there I was, staring into the abyss, and the abyss was waving back at me, saying hi and behaving inappropriately. I decided to quit. The idea of not having a job was not as scary as the possibility of ending up stranded there for another X years. Let me tell you, it was a relief (the same way Hugh Jackman felt when he knew he wouldn’t have to wear a yellow spandex back in the day — although we ended up asking for the Wolverine to wear his classic suit. See? We make decisions way too late), but I could not help but ask myself: now what? Luckily one of my closest friends just asked the right question: why don’t you check out a web development bootcamp?
“A what?”
I wasn’t unfamiliar with the basics, like, I knew what HTML and CSS are, and I knew about JavaScript, PHP and Python, but just that — for me they were like those relatives you have never met but that are part of your family memorabilia. I did a little research and all the blogs were encouraging me to get into it — that’s when I became suspicious: not all that glitters is gold, and I was committed to making the most out of whatever decision I was making this time.
I talked to a couple of people that were in the industry, I did an even larger research, and it looked promising: the variety of languages, frameworks, tools… If I had learnt something about learning it’s that the moment you stop, it’s not going to come back easily. I just came across something that will require my continuous dedication, that would be hard to get bored of — and, the most important part, that I had the time to learn for real.
It was time to make some decisions, the first one being: was a bootcamp meant for me? That part was easy — any time I have to face learning something new I prefer to immerse myself in it, go from 0 to as-far-as-I-can-get. Then start to cement my new skills with practice and more practice. The concept of bootcamp was giving me that opportunity. Ok, now I had to choose: where?
You never know what is happening around you until you decide to start looking. And apparently there were quite a few code schools in my city — wonderful, I even got to choose! But which was the one for me? In terms of structure and curriculum they were pretty much alike. Then I came across Ironhack and there was a plus in there: career advice. An extra week to have the chance to meet some local companies that might be interested in hiring; most of the time I hesitate to take the first step, so an icebreaker like this was as good as if it was tailor made.
Well, there were actually two pluses, also the location: just a 15-minute walk from home and a three-minute walk from my CrossFit gym — it might look silly, but now that I wasn’t working, that area was where I spent most of my time, so joining Ironhack was like finding the missing piece of the puzzle that was my life at the moment.
Of course, I had my doubts, which were kindly answered both by e-mail and during my first interview at their facilities — a technical interview and some previous work was my path to begin a new career in two month’s time. And so I did my technical which I passed on my first try — though I still wonder how because I haven’t been so nervous doing a test in a long time. I began preparing myself with a warning, as well as a promise, in my head: you’ll accomplish during those 9 weeks as much as you’re willing to put in in hard work.
January arrived and I jumped into one of the biggest adventures I have had so far. I’m not going to get sentimental and say I still remember who I was sitting next to on day one (although I do: a peculiar English lad with a ton of cheese jokes up his sleeve), but there I was, right next to twenty-one other (soon-to-be) developers being introduced to our own Obi-wan Kenobi.
Although nothing would have been the same without any of the members of the staff or our wonderful assistant teachers (assistants to the teacher), I think it’s worth taking a few seconds to acknowledge how lucky we were to have that wise, crazy tech-sage as our teacher, sharing his baggage and making us understand what he loved about coding. You cannot teach with passion something that you’re not completely passionate about, and leaving every day knowing a bit more about how little we knew about code was mental.
The experience was intense, as well as hard. I would love to say that my life did not stop at all during those two months, that I was able to keep on doing most of the stuff I had been doing — but I just can’t. Almost every day my life was revolving around new concepts and I had little to no time for anything else. I even remember watching some football games while working with my laptop because there was some iteration I had not done or some problem I could not solve. I couldn’t even take a small pause from coding — in a sense a bootcamp is like being addicted to drugs. The main difference being that once you’re done, instead of going to addiction support groups, you go to StackOverflow. It sounds exhausting, right? You might be wondering: how do you get through that?
With a little help of my friends
The only thing I hadn’t considered before enrolling in the bootcamp, the thing that I thought I couldn’t care less about, became the cornerstone of those nine weeks: the people I was “living” with. Twenty-one talented individuals that I grew used to, among which are some of my closest friends nowadays. Twenty-one young padawans that shared the same ambition, the same desire and the same thirst for knowledge. I got to work, cry, type lines and lines of code with them(and deleting half of those)… but specially I got to laugh, to share wonderful moments, to have some (maybe even too many) drinks, to clap (a lot) and enjoy the ride with them. All that hard work looks less tiresome when you have such amazing individuals by your side.
Sometimes you think that any new developer in town that has decided to take this path is exaggerating when they say that the experience changed the way their life was — I must admit, I was one of those people. They’re not exaggerating. I had one idea in mind, I was willing to invest in my education, my career, my future… and I got so much more in return, I’m quite sure I’m not the same person I was six months ago.
Almost four months have passed since I finished the bootcamp: I found my first job as a developer within the first month and I’m already halfway through my third month. Learning new stuff, putting into practice what I learned and being certain that, on that hot summer day when I decided to put an end to an era that was leading me nowhere, I made the decision I was looking for.
What’s next?
