Week 1 of WDI

Expectations vs. Realities

I have to say that I definitely made a great decision by pulling the trigger and attending this coding bootcamp to become a crazy-cool hacker like Neo. For everyone who doesn’t know, General Assembly is a 12 week long, full-time, fully immersive program that teaches you everything you need to know to become an entry-level full stack web developer. In the first week, we have covered the essentials of computer science, languages like HTML, CSS and Javascript, did some pair programming, some basic career counseling, met some techies and made 20+ new friends that are on this journey with me to become coding ninjas.

First, why GA?

I want to cover quickly a few points on why I chose GA. To start, there are many similar bootcamps in SF that cover a similar skill set. Some include Hack Reactor, Dev Bootcamp, App Academy, the list goes on. I chose GA for many reasons but my most notable reason was that as a company they have gone through the transition of a startup. Initially they were founded as a co-working space in New York, which they failed at quickly(~8 months). They started moving into a highly successful education model and have grown from that ever since. This really spoke to me, as someone who has been with a startup since it was bootstrapped-founded 2 years ago—that they had to go through adversity to figure out a business model for them that is revolutionizing the education industry. Not to say that the other bootcamps didn’t/haven’t gone through adversity, but GA was open about where the company came from and how they got to where they are today. Oh and the $50 million they just raised was a big sign that what they are doing may be working.

Anyway, enough about my tech-crush on GA.

First week expectations vs. realities

I have to say we covered a lot of topics really quickly in the first week, which was awesome. We quickly moved through HTML, CSS, and Javascript, covered the basics in Git and GitHub, and learned to navigate and use the terminal command line. I didn’t particularly know what to expect coming into the program. I’ve never done anything like it nor do I know of anyone who has, so I kept a really open mind and put a lot of trust into the instructors and staff to guide us along through the first week. The course has been a lot more structured than I originally thought. The days move quickly and we cover a lot of valuable information rather quickly. With learning all of this different information in 12 weeks, every hour counts, so having a solid structure helps in making sure everything goes smoothly.

What I’ve learned so far and what I’m excited to learn more about

As I stated earlier, we have covered some essentials of HTML, CSS and Javascript as well as Git GitHub and the terminal. Our first weekend project was a tic-tac-toe game in browser using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Yes, only Javascript. No jQuery, but Javascript. This project wasn’t necessarily “tough” so to speak, I mean it is tic-tac-toe, we have all played it before and we get the dynamics of it. My biggest hurdle with it was definitely the language syntax. When to use parentheses vs. a semicolon; how to make sure a variable is included in the .js file; when to space; making sure the DOM loads before variables are declared (that one was tricky); when and how to use operators. While these were the harder parts of the assignments, the greatest gains come from having to work through adversity. There were a couple of times when I wanted to throw in the towel and say “Alright! This is mighty fine enough tic-tac-toe game!” But re-reading the code and persevering was such an amazing lesson. Oh and reading documentation in depth to learn about a whole bunch of different methods that I would have never of even thought about— which ended up being super useful—was helpful.

While we have just started, I am so excited to learn more. I’m mainly interested in learning more about Javascript as well as HTML and CSS. The second half of the course covers Ruby, which I know is a valuable language to learn, but a good amount of the companies I am targeting for post-GA are looking for Java, JavaScript or Python programmers. While I’m not against Ruby, I personally suspect that I will use Javascript in my “capstone” project. We’ll see. From an outsider looking in, there are some similarities in the language. On top of that, I am interested in how the GA career coach and mock technical interviews go. I have never experienced either of those, so I’m curious to seeing how they turn out.

If you’re thinking about doing it, do it.

All in all, if you’re thinking about making a career change, or wanting to learn how to build cool stuff — take a bootcamp course. I spent 8 months “deciding” if/when I should take the leap of faith and try this bootcamp out and all I can think now is, why I didn’t start sooner?

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