Keeping Perspective in an Immersive Coding Bootcamp
A few months ago, I decided to take a huge leap of faith and quit my job in order to enroll in a web development immersive program at the Flatiron School. I’m sure most of you have heard of these bootcamps- promising to teach you to code to a level that will get you hired as a developer in 12–18 weeks (Flatiron is 15).
I’m in the middle of week 3 right now, and have been really struggling with our first project in Ruby this week. In partners, we’re working to build a CLI that allows the user to interact with a database we built, pulling from an API. Now- before any readers wonder- no, I wouldn’t have known the meaning of any of the words in that sentence just a few months ago. I have no background in coding, never took a computer science class in college, and yet here I am. So anyways, I’ve been feeling quite discouraged, like I just can’t pick it up. I ask myself often if maybe I’m just not meant to be a programmer- maybe my brain just doesn’t get it.
Then last night, I started thinking more about how far I’ve really come in the last 2.5 weeks, since July 17.
I remember so clearly, probably exactly 2 weeks ago on the Wednesday of week 1, being completely perplexed by the idea of instantiating an instance of a class. I just couldn’t get what was even going on- my brain was stuck. It took me (what felt like) an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure it out. Today, that is already second nature to me. Not only am I writing new classes, we’re building databases using ActiveRecord and allowing a user to interact with that database. We’ve already gone so far past how to write a class, that it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment anymore to understand it.
Even more than that, on Monday of week 1, I don’t think I even realized what a Class in Ruby was, let alone how to write my own. It’s pretty unbelievable how much we’ve learned in just two and a half weeks, no matter how much more there is left to learn.
I’m beginning to realize that this is just how an immersive bootcamp is. The learning curve is so steep that you constantly feel like you’re pushing a huge boulder up a hill. Just to keep up, you’re expending a huge amount of effort and accomplishing so much — but every time you start to feel like the weight has lightened, more work is added and it gives heavier.
Despite that, we’re moving forward. There are huge ups and downs every day of a bootcamp, simply because of the pace we’re moving through the material- every day feels like it’s about a week long. I’m realizing the importance of keeping perspective, and taking looks back to realize just how far I’ve come every once in a while (but not for too long, because like I said- there’s so much ahead that I have to stay focused on moving forward).
If anyone reading this is thinking of doing a bootcamp, or is in the middle of one, remember this. It’ll be hard to really see how much you’re accomplishing, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. The nature of the immersive model is intense (I’m dreaming about code now- to the point that when my alarm went off this morning I thought I had to code something to turn it off), and doesn’t feel particularly rewarding unless you take a moment to pause.
I have 12.5 weeks to go, and one of my goals for the next 3 months is to keep this in mind as I continue to struggle through. No promises on that actually happening, though!
