A Quick Review of My Year in Coding

Remember when it was 2019, almost 2020? So much hope, so much change, so, so many possibilities. It was, at least for me, looking into a year of radical change. I had decided to pack away a career in an industry I had been working in since I was 14, and remove myself from an industry I still love and work in from time to time as a freelancer. I was going to code. I was going to a bootcamp.

I was accepted to attend the Software Engineer program at Flatiron back in November of 2019. I had a lot of pre-work to complete and I took my time to ensure that I was going to be ready when I started. I had already been coding daily for over a year but I didn’t want to take chances, and on the 6th of January, off I went.

A bootcamp is intense. They tell you that. They warn you about it. Other people who have been to a program will tell you “get ready”, and “I hope you said goodbye to your family for the next 12 weeks”. It was super intense, the hours, the learning, so much learning. I truly felt the physical strain from trying to force my brain to do so much. I was exhausted, but it was worth it. Learning is one of the greatest human experiences, and yes it is not easy at times but it’s something genuinely rewarding at the least, and at the best, something that is life-changing.

Coding is life-changing, and as I went along in my program I began to discover just how much I was learning. If I looked ahead 3 weeks I would stare in awe at student projects, and think to myself “how did they know how to do all that??” I would then find myself in their place 3 weeks later and think “how did I know how to do all this?”.

I was finally in the groove. I was tired but I had my schedule. I was still intimidated but I was discovering my best practices for studying concepts. That is when a little world changing event happened, and suddenly I was going remote. I was literally half of the way through my program when COVID hit. Time to relearn how to learn how to relearn how to learn? again? coding?

Working remote is part of being in tech, but I wasn’t technically in tech yet. It was a hard adjustment. I was supposed to be in a class surrounded by my peers for hours a day. Now I was alone, but determined. I graduated.

I graduated. I did it. I completed a bootcamp program. It’s a pretty big accomplishment for me, but my coding journey was not, nor is it ever complete.

Since I’ve learning multiple programming languages not taught at Flatiron. I’ve learned new frameworks and built large apps via tutorials. I’ve learned multiple backend services, I’ve done and learned so much if it weren't for my decision at the beginning of the year to attend Flatiron. My job search continues but I remain positive, as we are in the midst of a very tumultuous year in general, perhaps the most tumultuous in many of our lifetimes.

I refuse to stop what I started, and I will continue to code daily until I can look back, just as I did in my bootcamp, at myself and see how far I’ve come. It has been a great year for coding. On to the next!