A new journey begins soon!

I like experimenting and building mini-projects (mostly websites and WordPress-powered blogs) on the side, and I really wanted to build more projects that are guided through those Udemy courses and free sources, but once again, it’s hard to keep concentration because of all these other distractions. I also have a bad habit of keeping things to myself and not quite talk about my code-learning journeys to anyone in real life.¹ So far, I have mentioned about enrolling in a coding bootcamp for awhile now from here and here and my current status on this new journey.

Flatiron School

Remember in one of my last entries that I enrolled in a second bootcamp program after I failed in getting admitted to the first one I enrolled into because of that darn skills test?² After failing, I applied for my second choice bootcamp program also provided by my employer’s career advancement benefit program. I am happy to announce that I have been accepted and ready to begin when the program starts at the end of this month (Feb. 28).

I didn’t mention the names of the bootcamp programs that the career advancement program offered just to avoid myself from badmouthing any of them specifically,³ but now that I succeeded in getting admitted to my second choice, I can at least reveal this particular one.

I think many developers and would-be developers in the interwebs tech community are familiar with this particular bootcamp: Flatiron School.

Somehow, I felt much comfort and enthusiasm when I spoke with one of their admissions reps over Zoom just a few days ago (as of this writing), plus their skills assessment after I applied⁴ It’s not really a test, it’s more of giving us a mini basic lesson in Javascript and they would quiz us to see how much we learned and how much we absorbed from the reading material. Since it’s super-basic Javascript and I’ve dabbled with Javascript all my life with both ES5 and ES6,⁵ it was very straightforward. I did make one mistake, which was at the very first quiz. It was reading material about the introduction to super-basic coding and I got mixed up with two terms. Nevertheless, I won a Zoom interview with an admissions rep.

I scheduled my Zoom interview originally at the last Wednesday of January, but because Mom wanted to go shopping, I had to reschedule it to next Wednesday (2/2). That went very smoothly and I simply shared my story with her about my struggles financially and how I couldn’t afford bootcamps out-of-pocket and my primary reason why I wanted to enroll in a bootcamp was because of the mentorship and guidance in learning how to code to job placement assistance and coaching. Luckily, since I already tested the puddles in both Javascript and Ruby, I think I’ll be able to do well for the most part. I hope I keep up.

The curriculum is a little more flexible in terms of scheduling. The previous bootcamp program that I applied to were on Mondays and Wednesdays with 8 hours. If I did get into that program instead, I would have to request a schedule accommodation with the HR department and that I’d have to have Mondays off. With Flatiron School, there will be live classes and it’s only 2 hours long on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Luckily, we’re not required to attend all live classes, as they will be recorded for those who won’t be able to attend. The advisor also advised me that it’s recommended if I attend at least one live class a week.⁶ Recorded classes aren’t a problem for me, except that it’d be a little harder to ask the instructor questions right then and that I would have to ask teaching assistants on chat instead. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

And as mentioned from my previous posts, the company pays for the tuition and fees and I don’t have to pay anything out of pocket. The only thing that I would have to pay anything out of pocket was for the computer with the required specs. I have two laptops, my Dell Inspiron (16GB memory) and my old Macbook Pro mid-2015 (8GB memory) and the bootcamp requires a minimum of 8GB memory. Both laptops are old as heck, but they still got the powers enough for me to take the courses. I may have to invest in a separate webcam instead of the built-in one because this is a Zoom live class after all.

My Flatiron School journey will begin on Feb 28th and will end on my birthday, Oct 14, of this year. My employer is both a tech and a retail company⁷ and hopefully I can find a position within the company (as a transferee) and if that doesn’t work, I’ll search for openings at other companies. One of my goals too in finding a job in the software development field is to also work from home.

What can I say? I feel most comfortable and (probably) more productive at home. Well, I also like working outside home, in the library or one of those co-working spaces (but then I’d have to pay some kind of a fee). I could just not contact HR to have scheduling accommodations and watch the recordings instead while I attend the live class on Wednesdays. Or maybe I can take Monday or Friday off for my live class here at home. Or even a crazier idea: bring my laptop to work, work my first morning hours and then leave a little before lunchtime, and then take my class in the break room from 12pm until its finish at 2pm and go to work after that. Not sure yet, I’m still deciding.

The Curriculum

The program is specifically created for my company’s employees. All of my classmates attending the Flatiron Software Development bootcamp are all going to be my fellow coworkers (from different locations and sectors, not just my own sector) and no one outside. All of the advisors and even my admissions rep all work specifically towards my company’s fellow coworkers from around the world. That’s how specific it would be.

One of the things that we get to have aside from projects we made and a portfolio we get to build⁸ is that we get to have a tech blog. My guess would be that because we are learning the following: Javascript, HTML/CSS, Node, React, APIs, and Ruby (on Rails), I don’t think I’d be able to use Adrianne Codes as my tech blog. They would definitely want us to build and design our own using what we’ve learned. I may end up using a static site generator such as Jekyll or a framework for headless CMS like Gatsby and probably host our sites in the cloud (ex. GitHub Pages or Netlify. Or maybe Flatiron School has their own built-in CMS where we simply write our blog entries in there and that only our fellow classmates and instructors and mentors can read them. I don’t know. We shall see.

I have tried Ruby before. I’ve taken their Ruby (on Rails) course on Skillcrush but I had to stop because of a slew of technical issues and errors that I had to go through and fix. When I couldn’t fix some things with my system, I simply gave up on it. Ruby was a joy, but installation and setting up Ruby-based environments really gave me a headache. Luckily, Flatiron School has their own in-house platform (probably like CodePen or Repl.it) for us to use so we don’t have to meddle with the setup and installation in our machine.⁹

Some who may be reading this must be thinking why I’m taking the "basics" again when I already took the "basics" from Udemy and other learning platforms I went through before. Learning is one thing, but applying what we learned in real-life situations such as building projects was what I lacked. I really couldn’t consider myself an "expert" or a "legit coder" without really building things from scratch. I’ve already done some with HTML/CSS, but not so much with Javascript, Ruby, etc.

Final Note

As I write this entire blog entry, I gazed at my Coding Manifesto poster on my wall right now. There is one line that always struck me the most as a code neophyte: Remain a beginner. Remain a learner. – and it was right smack at the center of the poster, it’s so hard to miss and ignore. I believe this line is very important to me. It reminds me that no matter how much I know my "craft," because technology upgrades so quickly from time to time that I will always remain a beginner.

I hope with the help of Flatiron School’s guidance that I can (somewhat) be able to overcome this heavy level of imposter syndrome still living inside me. Wish me well on this brand-new journey.

For the technical blog, unless permitted, I won’t be blogging much here. But for personal outtakes regarding the curriculum, I may post them here.

Signing off right now. Laters!