669 Lessons Read.
345 Labs Completed.
5 Porfolio Projects Built.
And now I’m finally ready to graduate from the Flatiron Fullstack Bootcamp!
I’m both incredibly excited and extremely nervous to move on to the next step - officially making the career move. At first, I had planned to do my first technical blog post, but then I decided this final project blog post would be a great time to reflect on what I’ve learned during the course of this program, and give some advice to those just getting started that I wish I had taken.
What was the biggest lesson I learned?
How to code.
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Just kidding - I think my biggest lesson has been how much I can NOT know while still being successful. Something that has kept me pretty nervous while contemplating switching careers is that there is just SO MUCH to know about coding. Even figuring out what language to start with, or figuring out why there are so many, seemed insurmountable at first. I kept hoping that there would be some basic core reference point that would ground me and I could build from there and understand everything, similar to how most math can be boiled down to addition, subtraction, and division. This is unfortunately not the case - there are basic underlying concepts and structures (and it is extremely important to understand these), but there’s nothing concrete that underlies everything and makes up the “core” of coding.
Instead, there is documentation. Tons and tons (and tons and tons) of documentation. In fact, there’s so much out there that nobody could ever be expected to just know everything, so virtually everything code-related has documentation so you can self-learn how to use it. Even the languages that are used today are, themselves, essentially just libraries that someone has coded. So the fact that you don’t know Python should not be scary - just go find the documentation and go through the methodology that this course teaches to figure it out method-by-method. During this course, it frequently tells you to go read documentation for further understanding - do it. It will pay off later when you need to use a new library in your project and have to consult similar documentation to figure it out on your own.
If you want to see this concept proven, keep an eye out when watching the videos where the instructors are live-coding. They are constantly getting tripped up and searching online for answers, and these are the people teaching this stuff! Be confident in your ability to self-learn and creatively apply concepts and you’re golden. Try to memorize everything and you’ll be quickly overwhelmed.
What would I have done differently / advice to myself at the beginning?
My one year completion goal was left waaay back in the dust as it took me just shy of 2 years to complete. While certainly disappointing, I’m proud and delighted that I was able to get through this at all while working a fairly intense full-time job. If I were to do this all over again, the biggest thing I would change is I would try harder to work out a way to reduce my hours at my day-job to allow myself to focus more on coding. Not only would that help speed things up and avoid burnout, which was the #1 challenge I faced throughout the couse, but even more importantly it would have given me more time to live and breath coding.
Over the last 2 years I’ve realized that, as much as everyone constantly and repeatedly stresses the importance of constant practicing, it’s importance is actually UNDERstated. It’s incredibly important to immerse yourself not just in generic coding, but in each and every language/framework you’ve learned. This is because, like learning a new language, it’s very easy to un-learn everything when you don’t constantly practice it. This is made even more challenging due to the modular structure of this program. By the end of the Rails section, I was feeling great about my Ruby skills, but last weekend I did a CodeWars challenge and found that I got stuck immediately because I’d forgotten so much about basic Ruby already. If I had had more time to devote to coding (and less to working) I could have “sharpened the saw” by regularly doing coding challenges in Ruby while learning JavaScript.
I was nervous to fully jump in and risk my current career for the promise of a new one, but my advice now that I’m on the other side: continue to work while you learn Ruby, but once you set up your local environment, it’s time to reduce all other priorities to the greatest extent your financial and personal ability will allow and focus 100% on learning and practicing your coding. If this means quitting your current job and getting a part-time job in the mean-time, so be it. It truly is hard to overstate how positively impactful this will be to what you will get out of the course if you do. Remember, thanks to the money-back guarantee, if you can’t get a job at the end, you’ll at least have a large check to hold you over until you do.