#coding boot camp

Turning the Tide: Florencio Rendon’s Journey to a New Career When Florencio Rendon found himself laid off from his third construction job in just three years, he felt an overwhelming sense of despair. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he recalled. At 36 years old, with two young children depending on him, the urgency to secure a stable and better-paying career weighed heavily on his…

I am in the last week of my experience at Promineo Tech’s back end developer program.  It’s been 18 weeks of learning Java, MySQL, Spring Boot, Thymeleaf (on my own, but I want to try to make a complete final project), Git, and the Command Line.  My final project is in a good spot.  There are still some errors, but at least I know I am heading in the right direction to fix those errors.  

Though it may not seem immediately relevant to pay tribute to David Bowie in a web development blog, I am a lover of music first and a student of technology second. I have been rocking out to his tunes all day, and they have brought up nothing but great memories. Thanks for the righteous tunes and brilliant art, Mr. Bowie! You are missed.

Before I describe all of the things we went over in week one of the Epicodus ‘Intro to Programming’ course, I will rattle off a couple of pertinent details about how Epicodus works. In order to graduate, I will need to complete five courses, each lasting five weeks. The first of those courses is the Intro class I am currently in the midst of. The final course is actually an internship with a local company that is yet to be determined. I have a few options when it comes to the three middle classes. One option is the PHP-JavaScript-Drupal track, one is the C#-JavaScript-.NET track, and the final option is the CSS-JavaScript-Design track. I am not yet sure what option I am going to chose. if you have any insights or recommendations, feel free to let me know!

I am at Epicodus M-F from 8-5, so it is pretty much a full time vocational school. It is conveniently located in downtown Portland, which for me is a 15 minute MAX ride away. There aren’t really lectures, and it is pair program driven. This means that we do not have a teacher lecturing us, we have an online curriculum that we follow along with our pair for the day. The pair agrees on a pace, we watch videos and complete exercises/build webpages. The teacher is there to help when you get really stuck, but only after you spend a good 15-20 minutes trying to figure it out with the help of your partner/other pairs. Even then, the teacher will more likely ask you questions to point you in the right direction.

I started this class with a basic knowledge of HTML and a bit of CSS, so some aspects of the first week were familiar, but for the most part I felt like I was constantly treading water. This, I expect, will become a familiar feeling over the next 5-6 months. Based on what I have heard from people well established in the tech industry, it will likely be a familiar feeling for many years to come. We were all told to embrace this sometimes uneasy feeling because it’s more or less here to stay. There are always things to learn in this industry, and it is ever changing. I am personally pretty excited to continually expand my knowledge, and the beautiful, fleeting moments of clarity are pretty fantastic.

After the first week, I have working knowledge of:

Version Control Systems. Specifically git. Git helps track and manage changes to the code we write.

GitHub.

The command line/Terminal (we are working on macs).

Atom (a text editor).

Markdown (a simple way to style text on the web. We’re mostly using it for READMEs).

HTML (hyper text markup language-provides structure for page).

CSS (cascading style sheets- describes how html elements will be displayed).

Bootstrap (a free, open source collection of tools used for creating websites/apps).

The following is the product of the week’s final code review. We fly solo for the code reviews, so this is the result of 8.5 hours of me pulling my hair out while listening to a lot of Radiohead and Morphine: 

jordan-meier.github.io

I’ve spent the last few weeks pacing around my apartment, oscillating between coffee and booze, and trying to overcome some major imposter syndrome after receiving some fantastic news: I’ve been accepted into the third cohort of the Ada Developers Academy, a tuition-free coding school for women. This program is an extreme commitment – you attend onsite training full-time for seven months, then dive into a five-month internship as a programmer. We start this May. So for the next year, I’ll be completely immersed in coding.

As a writer who’s been tangentially involved with tech via previous retail experiences, I’ve written and read a whole lot about the lack of women in STEM fields. I know that underwhelming representation figures have compelled the White House to put together a Women in STEM initiative and that Google sent aspiring female developers to Code School for free. Women made up just 21.4% of the U.S. programming workforce in 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Receiving an opportunity to lead change and queer my tech through my future involvement in programming is both thrilling and terrifying.

One non-random example:

I am enrolled in a 12-week web development immersive boot-camp style course.

The demographics of my class (as they appear to me) are as follows:

Total students: 22

Males: 19 (86%)

Females: 3 (13%)

White: 17 (77%)

Non-white: 5 (22%)

Asian: 3 (13%)

Black: 1 (4%)

~

According to wikipedia:

IN PROGRESS:

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Name - General Assembly

Location - Washington, DC

Status - Currently open

Details - Short and 12-week courses

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Name - Hungry Academy

Location - Washington, DC

Status - Not in session or defunct?

Details - An in-house school run by Living Social.

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