Make a brew, grab a Kit Kat. It’s…
… The Story So Far.
#1. Welcome.
#2. You still here? I’m glad. Read on…
Somehow you found it; the first post in my blog, tracking my journey as I learn “computer programming” (or coding, or CompScience, or IT if you prefer) as a second career path.
I’ve been on my journey for just about a year now, on and off, so in this kick-off post I’ll just share a brief(ish) timeline of The Important Or Interesting Bits. Your brew’s already getting cold and the Kit Kat is probably gone so I won’t hang about.
Pre-Y2K. Got some qualifications, got an Engineering Degree, started working as a Design Engineer.
2017, Jan. “You’re Fired”. Well, made redundant actually. I considered my options and knew that I wanted a change.
2017, Feb. Discussions with my wife and, crucially, a red-wine-fuelled conversation with a friend resulted in a trip to the local public library (after sobering up the following day) where I borrowed “C Programming: Absolute Beginner’s Guide”.
2017, March. Took the book back to the library, bought a copy, worked through diligently, realised I enjoyed this coding thing quite a lot and seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly.
2017, April. Waded through a gazillion webpages trying to decide what to do next: coding bootcamp, MOOC, books, Udemy, Lynda, etc. The massive positive feedback about Harvard University’s online version of their “Intro to Computer Science” course, CS50x, convinced me that was the right choice. (It was).
2017, May, June. While employment at the engineering company slowly limped to an unremarkable finale, in my spare time (and, ahem, quite a bit of company time as well) I became totally engrossed by what I was learning with CS50x. Working exclusively in C, I was designing simple programs, writing algorithms, and generally learning a lot about the basic elements of most current programming languages (e.g. loops, searches, sorts, data structures).
Here’s a link to the work I completed for the CS50x course.
2017, July, Aug. Free of the 9–5 I completed the ‘taught’ section of CS50x. The great thing about the course it that they give you loads of background info and enough to get you going on each problem, but it’s really down to the perseverance of the learner to complete each problem. Using my book, the course reddit page, and various other online communities (something by the name of StackOverflow seems popular), I completed the course.
Except, I still had a final project to complete.
2017, Sept, Oct, Nov. A nice contract job in engineering was offered to me, which I decided to take as a means of keeping the cash-flow flowing, but unfortunately this curtailed my CS50x exploits due to the inconvenience of working 8 hours a day. I’d decided to write an anagram-creating program in C (see my GitHub page for the code and other info concerning it’s creation). It took way too long to complete, mainly because I stubbornly continued to work down the path I’d set for the anagram-creation process. Once I stopped and re-thought how I could implement the required functions, I got it done in a few evenings.
In case you missed it here’s another link to the work I completed for CS50x. I’m kinda proud of it.
2017, Dec. Feeling powered-up like Sonic the Hedgehog following my success with CS50x, I started to think more seriously about how I should go about the serious business of career-changing to “something to do with programming”, as I call it. Bearing in mind how popular the Internet has become these days, a personal website for myself seemed like a good idea. My knowledge of HTML, CSS, JS, web servers, http, etc was quite limited, to say the least. So I read up online, and embarked on the Mozilla Developer Network HTML training. Heartily recommended if you’re the type that can read through documentation on a screen for a few hours at a time.
2018, Jan. Logical next step: Mozilla Developer Network CSS training. Heartily recommended.
2018 Feb. Armed with a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, and a domain name (www.jeremybowden.net) I created my website from scratch. It’s not going to win any design awards, but it does what I need at the moment, and the feeling of getting something like that accomplished after weeks of work is wonderful.
2018 March. Wanting to get back to “programming” rather than web design/development, I embarked on another online course which promised to get students thinking like software developers whilst creating solutions to problems. After a few days of watching the video lectures and working through the course content I decided that this course wasn’t for me so I re-thought where to go next. This brings about…
The Bootcamp Question.
£6000 is a lot of money. £8000 is even more. $10000 is quite a lot too. This is how much a bootcamp costs (the $10000 option was online, not even face-to-face with a teacher and fellow campers!) The structured approach; the intensive learning; the almost-guaranteed-a-job-in-London outcome are all great (if you want to work in London, which I don’t). But living in the bootcamp desert as I do (Leicester) I’m not sure about decamping to London for 3 months, nor do I really want to learn Ruby when most of the actual, real, paid jobs round my way are using C# or Java.
The jury’s still out, but I think I’ve decided what to do next. See you next post!
