Code School – Postmortem – Part II

Continued from Part I

The weekend bootcamp came and went pretty quickly. The basics of web development (AKA learning what happens when you click on a link in a browser besides “a page loads”) were covered, websites were launched and before you know it the weekend was over. It was enough.

After marinating on the thought for a little while I decided it was time. I loaded up the application page in my browser and… the application date had passed.

Damn.

On a whim I shot off an email checking to see if anyone had dropped out and if I still had a shot for the summer session. As luck would have it, fortune favors the mildly inquisitive. A few days later I had an interview and several days after that I had a curriculum: get comfortable with HTML and CSS because on day one you’ll be expected to work with it (the book we were assigned was by Jon Duckett and has the pleasure of being both informative and beautifully designed). So far so good, though, as it turns out once you apply for a 9-5 programming bootcamp you have to actually quit your job. In the interests of full disclosure I left a position in administrative assisting… somewhat non-ironically a field ripe for automation.

Two weeks went by quickly, but time slowed slightly for my non-deathbed conversion to OSX and then quickly sped up again.

Week One:

Day one is difficult to separate from all of week one without the aid of a spatula, but I vaguely remember introducing myself to a lot of unfamiliar faces who I count as friends today. The subject was Ruby, Git, and environment setup for anyone who hadn’t quite acclimated to their knew development home on the command line (hint: me!). The days were structured, lectures, assignments, readings and of course pairs for paired programming. I don’t recall the first few days being mind blowing, but they were demanding. A little later we found our Everest: Recursion. Most of us slammed our brains against the concept of implementing recursion and just before we grasped it we were moving on to the next thing.

I recall at the end of the week taking stock of myself. I was exhausted. 10 hour days and all of them spent learning something new. Everyday involved constructing context just to feel comfortable enough to crawl ahead another inch. I’d been out of practice educating myself for some time now. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this. I could quit the following week and only lose the deposit… I could probably get my job back. I’d give it one more week.

Week Two:

More Ruby, the command line doesn’t feel alien, programs are starting to do what I want them to. I think i’ll stick it out. Finding out that I wasn’t the only one completely off balance was a great comfort and paired programming really helped drive home that I was among good people to learn with.

Week Three:

Javascript, the language of web ubiquity and semicolons, but mostly semicolons. We started by way of jQuery. The pace had been set by now to the point that no one seemed particularly phased by the complete shift in programming language. The ability to make things fly across the screen was a welcome change from ASCII graphics on the command line. A good week for small constructive victories.

Week Four:

You can test Javascript? Weird.

Read the rest:

Read Part I Here

Part III: Group Projects, Agile Development, and Employer tours.

Bootcamp.io

Writing a post-mortem on code school helped me stumble across some interesting sites including this one: http://bootcamper.io/

An accounting of current code schools. Interesting if only for visualizing and quantifying the sheer breadth of schools, the number and the locations. Worth a browse.

Code School – Postmortem – Part I

Code school is long since over, at least in the context of the fast paced months since this all started in May. I attended Portland Code School for the 2013 summer session which spanned June, July, and August. 12 weeks of intense study and collaboration guided by Chuck Vose, our instructor, and of course a great deal of self directed study too.

This was a personal gamble for me… To say it was anything less would be playing down how this has affected my life. When I discovered Portland Code School I was gainfully employed and had been for the better part of a year, but not in the place I wanted to be professionally and not facing the kind of opportunities I felt I could seize upon. I’d been restless for a while, looking for opportunities that ‘clicked’ when I read them: teaching English outside the US, moving back to Iceland, starting my own business, pursuing voice acting (still thinking about that one…), going back to college. Nothing felt immediately satisfying until I started reading about code schools. I first had read about Dev Bootcamp last year and up to that point programming seemed like something I couldn’t begin to approach without a CS degree, but this seemed manageable. An entry point.

I stowed that thought in my head and pushed on with work, a bootcamp didn’t seem like it was enough and programming was such a big field. Could I afford the price tag? But, the articles kept coming and code schools kept popping up in my periphery during late night web surfing sessions. Finally, I started to do more research in earnest. First, I searched in San Francisco for more bootcamps and stories of their effectiveness, but San Francisco was far away and the bootcamps there were expensive. Next, I searched closer to home and found Code Fellows in Seattle. After much consideration I applied to Code Fellows, it offered the right combination of price, time invested, and sales pitch. I did not make the final cut, however, but was encouraged to apply for the next session.

Enter Portland Code School.

I’d come across PCS in my searches before, but the website didn’t quite grab my attention and it slipped my mind rather quickly at first. I was surfing reddit, the portland subreddit specifically, and saw a post about a weekend bootcamp at PCS (This one!). I inquired and went ahead with scheduling a bootcamp, a much easier lower commitment way of checking these guys out. By then the website had changed (and its changed again, go figure) and things were starting to look more appealing.

I began to research chuck, checked out the testimonials, researched some of the prior students. So far, so good.

Read Part II here

Read Part III here