A Year to Engineer

my path from academia to software engineer

[onifaux-blog]

Admittance

I was accepted to Fullstack Academy, and I’ve decided to go there. :) VERY excited to get started!!!

[onifaux-blog]

Acceptance

I was accepted to Fullstack Academy!!

I also interviewed with Thinkful and Hack Reactor, but I’ve decided to go with Fullstack. I’ve had great experiences with them so far and I’m confident I’ll go where I want to with their help. 

Scheduled a call with them tomorrow to figure out the next steps.

I also restarted my personal website and plan to use it as a tinkering spot to learn new things and show them off.

[onifaux-blog]

Applications

I finished Bootcamp Prep a couple days ago. It felt like closing the back cover of a book I don’t want to end. Luckily, it doesn’t have to end. I applied to both Fullstack and Hack Reactor and got interviews to both set up for next week. Fingers crossed, I’ll get in and start the next leg of this journey come mid-January.

[onifaux-blog]

Applied

So I can see why there aren’t many blogs that follow someone through the bootcamp process. It’s easy to get swept away in the learning!

I received a scholarship to take Fullstack’s Bootcamp Prep course, which I took advantage of. I hope I can thank whoever decided to hand out scholarships someday, it really opened a door for me. The class itself has been fantastic. The teacher really knows what he’s talking about, and I’m getting guidance on things like best practices that I’ve never been given before. This is the last week, wrapping up the intro to recursion and taking some practice admissions assessments.

I was feeling confident so I decided to apply to both Hack Reactor and Fullstack today. I passed Hack Reactor’s coding assessment and scheduled an interview. I have to wait for Fullstack to give me access to the assessment, if I’ll even have to? I think one of the things promised to those who take the Prep class is that the assessment gets waived if you pass it at the end. Either way. I’m pretty sure I’ll get into both.

Looking forward to it. :)

[onifaux-blog]

Alignment

In my adult life, there have been a few times where things felt they were happening easily and with purpose. It’s as if the path carved itself for me, whispering to me take one step forward. 

This is one of those times.

I’m so grateful.

[onifaux-blog]

The last few days have been a whirlwind. I attended a Fullstack Academy infosession and was given a huge discount on their Bootcamp Prep course, so I signed up. Class starts Monday! I’m very excited.

Last night, I went to an Intro to Javascript workshop hosted by Thinkful. It was super basic, day 1 codecademy material. I did learn the difference between == and ===, though, and got a chance to see who is affiliated with Thinkful. 

Today I signed up for a Javascript Fundamentals workshop hosted by Hack Reactor which I will go to this weekend. I am pumped. Things seem to be moving along much faster than I anticipated!

Bootcamp search narrowed down to: Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, Thinkful.

[onifaux-blog]

10 things

10 things to make me a better person this month

Practice piano every day (>=10 minutes)

Run three times a week

Work on paper 4 hours a day

Stretch every night before bed

Drink 3 full water bottles of water

1 coding challenge per day

Morning pages every day

Go dancing alone once a month

Meetups once a month

Work up website every day (>=10 minutes)

10 things to make me a better person this week

Put together a meal plan

Finish presentation for work

Go to meetup info session

Wake up 8AM every day (no snooze)

Write down dreams every day

Continue staying on top of dishes

Make food every day

Write a paragraph on paper every day

Print out new piece for piano

Design logo for app idea

10 things to make me a better person by tomorrow

Finish plotting risk analysis

Play with cats

Be kind to myself

Make slides with charts I’m proud of

Start working on annotated manhattan plot

Draft the remaining slides so I can ask for input tomorrow

Delete social media off phone

Organize phone

Organize room

Bed by midnight

[onifaux-blog]

Days 1 and 2

Yesterday, I let all of my professors know that I was withdrawing from classes. The response I got from my theory professor made me cry. But, like everyone, they were all supportive. 

I started the Intro to Javascript course at Codecademy. I have some experience with coding, so for the most part I am just learning the syntax. I also got a call from General Assembly, which was a place I was considering before I did more research. Another contact I got was from Fullstack Academy. I asked them what skill level I should be at before considering applying. They directed me to

www.codewars.com

And said to get down to 6 kyu challenges before having a good chance of getting in.

So without further ado, here is my to-do list for the next 5 months to become a good candidate. I plan on taking the Prep course at any of the three bootcamps I’m considering.

1. Memorize how to write these (in Javascript, Ruby, Python):

define a function

iterate over an array

looping from 10 to 1

skeleton of an if statement

access for arrays and objects

2. Memorize these Javascript methods

join()

length()

pop()

push()

reverse()

shift()

unshift()

slice()

splice()

Object.keys(yourObjectHere)

Strings

charAt()

concat()

indexOf()

search()

split()

sub()

substr()

toLowerCase()

toUpperCase()

3. Be able to get 5 points on any easy challenge

4. Optional, recommended: Build something

Pre-pre-prep:

Codecademy

Coderbyte

Codewars

TIMELINE (Apply By February 20th):

Hack Reactor: to start April 23rd

Fullstack Academy: to start April 16th - July 13th

Devcodecamp: not sure yet. 

Considering:

Thinkful. Seems pretty new and has mixed reviews.

Would do App Academy if they had a remote program.

Will add more as I get more information.

[onifaux-blog]

Day 0

Today, I told my PI that graduate school wasn’t for me.

The path to coding bootcamp and beyond starts today. I decided to create this because I have not seen any other real-time documentation of the road to software engineering through coding bootcamp. There are reviews post-bootcamp and skepticism pre-bootcamp, but nothing lived. 

I aim to document how I get there and what happens next.  In doing this, I hope I can help someone else who finds themselves in my position.