Note: this was an old entry in my programming journal dated 2018-07-09, this is unedited since I wrote it and I’ll leave an update at the bottom about how I feel about it today.
This journal entry also laid out my past work experiences and how I really started to gain momentum in my learning and career progression.
Coding Bootcamp Hindsight - 2018-08-09
I was just posting my response to the reddit post that started all of this journal stuff (my initial response had disappeared off my phone as I didn’t submit it and the reddit app refreshed when I changed the app from Youtube for Evy).
I’ve outlined how it’s perfectly possible to start a career in programming without attending a Bootcamp like Makers academy, after attending and thinking back on it I don’t know if they really taught me anything. They basically asked us to do a lot of self learning and provided someone to help answer questions, I also remember that I never really absorbed any information from the teaching they did, it was all very clunky and the classes basically involved looking at Ruby Koans or Git/Command-line equivalents.
It was not until I graduated and had to look for work did I start to learn things. Even then I struggled but luckly managed to find some Jobs where I was able to slowly pick things up. Not at Psyt or LoyaltyLion but at Velti/mGage and Rentify, that was when I had colleagues who I was able to learn from.
Velti/mGage had Dan and Emre, who I was able to speak with and look at the codebase in detail.
At Rentify, I really managed to pick things up through the challenges I faced there, the team was larger and they gave me real tasks to work on. Through that came many mistakes and learning experiences, I picked up JavaScript, a bit of ReactJS, Ruby on Rails in depth and had projects/features I can call my own. Edwin, Ryan, Joe and Luke really helped kickstart the programming knowledge I had today, Edwin especially helped and unofficially acted as the mentor I needed to learn the basics properly and grow into the dev I am today. It was unfortunate that I left at such a low note, failing to complete the feature that was assigned to me and ultimately left a poor impression on my last day. No point dwelling on this, I don’t think I became that close with them all ultimately.
Now I’m a PHP developer here at TwentyCI where the team is significantly smaller and so my role here encourages me to take in more responsibilities and improve my knowledge in programming so I can further my career. Tom has been a great help at explaining PHP and Laravel when I joined the project, once I got some hands on experience I think I began to pick things up quite quickly to the point where problems and challenges are not impossible to overcome at my level anymore. Bear in mind that Tom usually takes on the more difficult tasks or new work, whereas I pick up some of the simpler easier stuff (which I don’t mind), its largely stress free and so I think I’ll stay and only consider new opportunities once we get the property business going.
Summary
Hindsight is a great thing. It allows me to think back on decisions made and learn from them, it also feels like my experiences and mistakes can be used to help and inform others that might be wondering if they should follow the same path. Dwelling on mistakes or poor decisions can be useful but sometimes unproductive as well, better to think over it and consider how you would do something differently for next time and if a similar scenario comes your way, you may be able to use what you’ve learned to drive your decisions moving forward.
Summary 📝
So my thoughts about Coding Bootcamps have changed since I wrote this entry, I think it’s disingenuous of me to say I didn’t learn anything, but I do feel I didn’t get my money’s worth insofar that it had cost me £4500, and the knowledge I had gained at the time was not worth £4500.
That said, I managed to use the foundations of what I had learned to get an return on investment on that very quickly and maybe that was where the value actually came from.
So when asking myself was it worth the money, I would say no. Was the decision to enroll to this bootcamp, when I did, as a career changing move, absolutely.
Also, it’s worth noting that I was an early member of Maker’s Academy and they were still figuring out the curriculum. They also hadn’t built the reputation and partners they have today, so it was a bigger struggle for us early adopters than those who have enrolled in the past few years.
Do I recommend it? Probably I would, if you’re serious about pursuing a career in software development. It can be pretty expensive but you’d be able to get a return on that investment very quickly providing you put in the time and energy to make that happen.