Coding bootcamps are popping up all over the country. So what’s it like to attend one?
I’m not sure exactly how the idea that I should learn computer programming came to me. As I told my friends, my admissions advisor, and later my classmates, it was “just something I’d always thought about”. But that’s not exactly true. I’d always known it was out there of course — I grew up in the ‘80s, and my dad was a computer programmer. The old-school kind, working on mainframes. The Original Nerd. But somehow I’d never pictured myself in that role.
My ex-husband got a CS degree and a job at Google while we were together. The new and trendy Nerd. It’s true that I thought the simplistic command line games he made were intriguing, even if I didn’t really understand how they worked. But I still never pictured myself in that role.
I had gotten my degree in Interior Design. People told me I was creative. One Great Recession later, and newly single, I changed careers and started doing admin work. People told me I had good soft skills. I even found it fulfilling and enjoyable. Work didn’t feel like work..
So when and how did I start thinking about leaving something that was working for me?
Why change?
Maybe something in me wasn’t quite satisfied. Maybe experience told me that life is an ongoing series of transitions. Maybe I just knew that admin work wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go in life. But somehow I started looking around from my comfortable job and decided to try something new.
It started simply enough - when people asked me little questions like “Would you change anything in your life if you could go back in time?”, I said I would have gotten a Computer Science degree. I live in Seattle, a center of the tech industry, so it was never far from my thoughts. Over time, the little voice in the back of my head had been talking about it for so long that I started talking about it out loud. To my friends, on dates, with random people, on dates with random people. I had mention-itis. I knew myself well enough to know that voice wouldn’t go away unless I did something about it. (That’s how I ended up living in France for 3 months that one time). So I took a one-day workshop on HTML and CSS. And really enjoyed it. Then I took a week-long JavaScript class. And continued to enjoy it. And then I researched classes and community colleges and online courses and found my way to bootcamps. And to Flatiron School.
There are lots of options to choose from, as far as continuing education goes. An over-abundance of programming jobs on the market and not enough trained professionals has led to many variations of the coding bootcamp to choose from. Flatiron had what I was looking for on my path to re-frame my future, fit my schedule, and from the start were nothing but welcoming and positive.
I started talking with Admissions, I started working on the pre-work lessons, I started to picture what a 10-month online after-work commitment would look like. I started to make this a reality.
And then I thought, “oh gosh, what am I doing? I’m not a programmer! I’m not a math-whiz! I’m not ‘techie’!” Who did I think I was, messing around in the tech world, leaving my safe admin world, shaking up my life yet again?
Let’s just say that the encouragement and support of my friends, the Flatiron staff, and the people I’ve met so far - even though this journey has just barely gotten underway - has been immensely helpful. A random guy who was coming into class as I was leaving one of my workshops told me that “anyone can learn to code”. Not to minimize the effort involved in learning this skill, but that was SO helpful to me to calm my fears of not having the right background, not having built a computer from scratch, or having obsessed over coding in my parent’s basement when I was 15. My apologies for all the stereotypes, but that was what came to mind when I pictured a computer programmer.
The course officially begins this week. Today I’m feeling excited and a little over-confident. I know that will change. Follow along as I share my labs and what I’m learning, as I wallow in self-doubt, and hopefully celebrate some successes too, and let’s see if I can figure this whole “coding” thing out.