When first deciding I would skip the traditional college education, and focus the start of my coding career towards a more alternative route, the options were very intimidating. Do I teach myself, take online courses, or go to a boot-camp? Once focusing upon the idea of a boot-camp, the vast magnitude of options didn't feel like they had narrowed down, but instead increased. Deciding if a coding boot-camp is worth both the time and money is a very difficult thing to choose. And as I went in completely blind with only a few expectations, I would like to specify the key values I took away from my program. Appreciate suffering and setbacks The tedious amount of acronyms in programming that you will have to remember is important, but the most critical one I was exposed to was SFT; Suffering, Frustration, and Tears. Sounds fun, no? Writing code is super easy, but writing code that works? That's a whole other story. Not only that, but once you make a semi-functional app, then you run into the problems of deploying. This is extremely frustrating, but you come to learn as you progress through the boot-camp that suffering is part of growth. In order to become successful in anything in life, you have to first fail. And you will have those moments in code, over and over and - actually throughout the whole course of your career as tech is constantly evolving. So learn to enjoy the process. Just like the pain you experience in a gym working out your muscles, you experience the same with your mental fortitude and critical thinking while coding. You will only get stronger over time, increasing your skill...and well, your market value *wink wink*. Don't learn a language, learn programming Don't worry about learning a programming language, focus on learning programming itself. What do I mean by that? Let me give you a short story. Through the course of my boot-camp, I learned many languages. Python, JavaScript, C#, and more on my own time. But during each of those languages, I was only given so little time to learn the basics before diving head-first into building a application, and then never using it again during my studies. I found this increasingly frustrating, "Why am I not given any time to learn these before building a application, and then not given time to improve on my skills?" Because you don't master a programming language, you master critical thinking. I discovered this not too long after my boot-camp experience. All programming languages are essentially built the same: loops, functions, conditionals, etc. The only thing different is syntax and special use cases. The reason the boot-camp gave me so little time to learn before building was due to the fact that I had to strengthen my critical thinking in order to build the required software. This increased my programming skills ten-fold and boosted my career possibilities immensely. Think about it, tech is changing so constantly, new languages and updates around every corner, and thousands of ways to tackle problems with the need for different approaches. So wouldn't it only make sense to develop logical skills that you can quickly apply to any new language? Take that a step further, and realize that this critical thinking also applies to other areas of your life. Don't fear mistakes This, like other points I mentioned previously, applies to also your personal life. When given projects and applications to build, I would sit for hours wondering how to solve the problem at hand. Not wanting to build something incorrectly and have setbacks later on. "Would this run?", I would often ask my instructor, and the same response would always echo back, "Why don't you run it and try it?" Diving into code without fearing not being able to do it definitely boosted my problem solving and coding confidence. Having to start from nothing, run broken code, fix it, and celebrate is still one of my favorite things about coding. When fearing mistakes, you don't push forward and jump into a problem. Instead you sit and ponder, until time passes you by and you come to realize that you have yet to take action. For anyone hesitant to jump into the boot-camp experience, just do it. When first reading the course description, I was excited. But I would have been even more excited if I was aware I would learn these mindsets and practices. I learned things that not only apply to my career, but my life. These lessons bring value to my perseverance of achieving my goals and ambitions else where outside of the tech world. I can not recommend this experience enough.
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