The Beginning/Pre-Bootcamp

About Me:

I was inspired to create a blog about my coding experience from my friend, Ted Whang's Blog. This blog serves any potential programmers or students that want to get into programming and see what a bootcamp is like. I also wanted to do this for myself so after I'm done with the bootcamp and some odd years down, I have a collection of my struggles, achievements and everything in-between to look back on. In my humble opinion, you're not really living unless you're moving from place to place and this blog will catalogue my trip! 

A little about myself: my name is Eugene and a (sort-of) recent graduate from the University of Washington, Class of 2014. I graduated with a BS in Physiology and a minor in mathematics. From the time I graduated to now I spent my graduation summer working at Express before landing a job as a compensation analyst at ADP. I was pretty satisfied to land a decent paying job that was not related to my major but that satisfaction soon became stale. 

Although I learned a lot about the corporate world and the professionalism that comes with it, I yearned for something more challenging. I've always liked programming but never decided to apply to the CSE or Informatics major at UW since my heart was set med school. After taking CSE 142, I really enjoyed the mental challenge; coming up with different algorithms to solve the numerous problems on practiceit!, the joy of running a program that doesn't have a syntax error, or the relief of plugging in one simple line of code to make my entire program work. So I started to research more about coding schools.

I've had numerous friends who've done coding bootcamps, with two having graduated from CDojo (Ted as mentioned above). I've also had friends who moved down to SF to do Hack Reactor, and a friend who did CodeFellows in Seattle. Based on all I've heard and seen from friends and websites, all bootcamps seem to have similar mentalities; change your life in x weeks, revamp your career, jumpstart your career, 60+ hr of work/week etc. 

My first choice was CodeFellows since they had a guarantee of job placement and had a small class size for individual student attention. However I was not able to test into their development accelerator course and their 301 class (the course before the DA) started in December. I didn't believe waiting that long was worth it and my youthful angst definitely pushed against it so I gave CDojo another good look. To my surprise, CDojo changed a lot about their curriculum, adding 2 new stacks (Python, iOS) to their 3 original stack (MEAN, LAMP, RUBY). 

What led me to enroll in CDojo is three parts (in no particular order): 

1. Proximity. CDojo states they are in Seattle but their campus is actually in Bellevue, 10 minute drive from my house.
2. New stacks. The new curriculum of having two extra stacks as well as a more fleshed out course and learning outcome attracted me as well.
3. Time. The next start date was mid-October and from listening to friends and my own gut, I decided that having a structured curriculum, regardless of what school will serve me better than to wait 3 months. 

To follow up my last reason; there are people who wants the perfect environment to learn in and when you're paying $10k + of your own money, you should have the right environment to maximize your potential. But I also believe that the world will never give you the perfect environment so it is advantageous to adapt. CDojo's main objective is to produce self-sufficient programmers/engineers and a great by-product of that is getting a job. Its motto of learning through struggling is something that sounds daunting but when you make it over the learning hump, the rewards seems even sweeter.

I am one and a half week from the start of the bootcamp and for the past couple of months I've done a fair bit of prep. I've finished CodeAcademy's JavaScript and HTML/CSS Track, reviewed and finished all the practiceit problems for CSE 142 at UW. On Treehouse, I'm halfway through the Front-End Web Development track. I am planning to finish that track and also the new Python/PHP track on CodeAcademy in conjunction with all the pre-camp work that CDojo has given me.

Anyways I think I've babbled enough about myself. Time to start prepping!