Study Tips from the Road

April 29, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

Hi there! I haven’t blogged here in a while, so I thought I’d give a quick update on how my program is going. I’ve made decent progress in the month since my last update.

All told, here’s what’s left. Basically I have three major project/assessments and AngularJS left.

* Rails: 1 lab & 1 final project
* JS: 5 labs
* Rails + JS: 3 labs & 1 final project building on top of the Rails final project
* AngularJS: 55 lessons/labs left & 1 final project

Of course I always wish that I were further along, but I think that I can definitely see the end 😀 . And considering that I was traveling for half of April, it’s not too shabby! Having the flexibility to travel was one of the reasons that I chose to study with an online program, although I admit that I had my doubts about actually getting anything done on the road.

Here’s what’s helped me stay on track with studying while visiting New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles:

* In general, have everything you need to work ready to go in your bag: for me, that’s my computer, music/headphones, coffee mug, notebook and my cellphone to use as a hotspot. Having those things on me at all times made it easy to bang out a couple of labs during travel downtime.
* It’s worth the space to pack your best headphones. My Sony MDR-7506 over ear headphones are large, and take up precious real estate in my backpack, but packing them was a great choice. I was able to block out lots of the annoying sounds of travel (babies, airplane hums, sorority girl banter…). Invaluable. Also, I don’t know exactly when this happened, but I guess since I wear them so much when I’m coding, putting the headphones on puts me in the mood to work. Pavlovian response I suppose.
* Study what you can in the hotel, but try to get out and about. Look for unusual spots to study: bars, park benches, train stations, Shake Shack 🙂 . Work that hotspot, or pre-load relevant content onto your phone before you head out (podcasts, videos, books).
* In New York I made it a point to stop by and study in my bootcamp’s physical location. It was something akin to visiting the motherland, LOL. Very inspiring and definitely motivation for me to work harder.

* Try not to feel too guilty about balancing fun / studying. If possible, pre-plan your hours for working vs. touristing. I tried to spend the morning and late evening studying, which became my “routine” after a couple of days.

I don’t have any more trips planned until a wedding in late May, so hopefully the next time that I post I’ll be sharing my Rails app. Just gotta commit to a project idea first…

Hump Day

March 30, 2016March 30, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

I’m having a hard time concentrating today, so I thought that I’d take a break to assess where I am in my program. Honestly, I can’t believe that it’s the end of March! As I mentioned earlier this month, I was hounded by this feeling of being “behind”, due to basically taking January off to earn some $$$. Totally reasonable, but I just couldn’t shake it.

March in Review

Anyways, I busted ass in March, upping my study time to ~55 hrs/wk from ~40 hrs/wk in February. I finished 2 unit final projects that I’d been putting off forever, and scheduled my assessments for them. I’m going to meetups of some sort every week, so that’s getting easier.

I’m itching to contribute to “real world” projects, so around the middle of the month when I found an open source software internship program for minorities, I really wanted to apply. However, when push came to shove, I didn’t pull my application together fast enough for that round of selection. It was a long shot, as I found out about the program 5 days before the deadline. Besides putting together my app for the next round, I’m exploring other options to contribute. Code for America’s San Francisco chapter has a few interesting projects along with a weekly hack night, and Up for Grabs looks like a cool site for finding open source projects that need help.

New Computerrrrr!!!!

I’d been holding out on buying a new computer until the next Macbook Pro release, but there were no computers announced at the March Apple event. Bummer! But I took that as a sign to finally bite the bullet and get my first new computer since… 2009? It’s awesome. I’m a week in and so far I love developing on a Mac. I should have done this months ago!

Rails & the Rest…

Anyways, what else… I’m finally in the promised land…. RAILS.

First off…

Hallelujah!!!

Secondly….

It is kicking my ass. Rails is vast. Rails is powerful. Rails has so many amazing features, you just gotta know the magic words. As I’m plodding through, I feel like I’m being inducted into Hogwarts or something. WHAT IS THIS BLACK MAGIC RAILS???

The Finish Line

For a while in my program, there was a bit of a running joke about “never finishing” because it felt like every day they were adding more and more lessons to the final section. However it looks like they’ve finalized the curriculum! So now I know where the end is. Here’s how I stand today:::

Rails 53/102 lessons w/final project
JavaScript 46/55 lessons (close!!)
Rails and JavaScript 13/46 lessons w/final project
Angular JS 7/111 lessons w/final project

So close, yet SO FAR… I don’t think finishing off JavaScript/Rails stuff will be too troublesome, but I’m honestly nervous about Angular based on what I’ve heard from classmates.

Oh well, time to get back to work.

Current Status: In Deep

March 4, 2016March 13, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

I originally wrote this on my personal blog, but it’s about my struggles with my coding program, so I’m crossposting here as well.

So, it’s March. I’m feeling kind of strange, to be honest.

In November I had the excitement of quitting my job, starting my bootcamp and traveling to Japan. In December I went to New Orleans and celebrated the holidays. During January I freelanced, effectively buying myself more time to study and job hunt. I also spent a little of that money sprucing up my apartment.

February. Oh dear February. The great grey ghost of February. After working full time the month before, I felt “behind” in my bootcamp, whatever the hell that means for a mostly self-paced program. Behind the other people in my cohort, behind my targeted end date, and worst of all, behind in my knowledge.

A Bit of Background

December 13, 2015March 21, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

How I ended up choosing an online coding bootcamp…

I love meeting other newbies like myself who are learning to code. I can’t help it, but I always have to ask:

Where did you come from? and Where are you going?

It’s funny, I feel like I’ve never heard the same answer twice. It’s truly inspiring how many different types of people are taking a leap of faith and making moves toward a career in technology. Fashion designers, line cooks, marketing managers, writers… and on and on.

So I guess I should say something about myself!

One of my first memories of programming (besides the usual HTML/CSS blog tinkering) was trying to program using econometrics software in college. This was back when I thought I would try to be an econ major. The class was super interesting, something about global economies, and the professor was a famous econ superstar. But… trying to learn to use that econ software broke me. I have never felt so stupid. I ended up dropping the course and switching my major several times, eventually settling on psychology (yep, I’m one of those people). In psychology there was a bit of work with statistics software, but nothing that could truly be considered programming.

In my first “real” job I learned a bit of SQL in order to pull data for analysis. It was a very dry experience that didn’t really have me longing to learn more.

The turning point came at my last job, where I was working with social media data. Despite the high tech industry, social media data analysis can oftentimes be a very manual job. For example, in order to track Twitter trending topics for a client’s product launch, ten employees would sit around for hours, refreshing their browsers for different markets every 5 minutes. That is so messed up!

I knew there had to be a better way, I mean… hello… APIs. So in September of 2014 I decided that I would try to build something to automate the work. I started out learning R (in the hopes of using the twitteR package), and about a month in, on the advice of one of my programmer friends, I switched over to Python.

After about a month or so of learning Python, I hadn’t solved the problem yet, but work put me in contact with another analytics team member in the New York office. He had written some scripts that were helpful for pulling social media data. I was able to work with the scripts, which seems so silly to say now, but this seemed to impress my boss- LOL. My employer offered tuition reimbursement, so I hopped on it and took a Python night class at the local community college. The class was like $46 a credit, so I didn’t need reimbursement, but hey, every little bit helps right? Taking the class was very painful… (Tuesdays, 6pm – 10pm, Jan – May) but after starting the class I improved so much more rapidly than trying to teach myself on my own.

Over the course of the next six months, I built a variety of small but useful Python scripts in order to solve various data analysis problems that we encountered – from filtering out simple name tagging in Facebook status posts to finding the original URL in a bit.ly link on a mass scale… Slowly my job shifted more toward the world of “data science.” Oh yeah, and I finished my Twitter Trends project too.

It was awesome, I was getting paid to code, and actually making a difference at work, saving my company both time and money. I went further down the data science rabbit hole and learned what I could online. I even looked into data science grad school programs. However, I found myself wanting to spend even MORE time coding, and less time on the “analyst” part of my job. Maybe data scientist wasn’t the best long term route for me, even though it was the hottest job of 2015.

I took another night course in August of 2015 – this time a one month long introduction to front end web development course at a coding bootcamp around the corner from my office (Monday – Friday 6:30pm – 9:30pm – ouchie).It was fun, so I decided to take the leap and study web development. Hey, all the cool kids are doing it!

I had been hesitant to try a coding bootcamp, but as the years passed and the number of graduates scoring jobs grew, I became more comfortable with the idea. Some people were really making it. The final moment I decided that it might not be a total scam was when I saw on Facebook that a former college friend of mine had just switched careers from journalism to web development. I knew her! And she did it! It seemed real, and attainable.

So I went to work constructing a gigantic spreadsheet of all my feasible bootcamp options. It was so overwhelming, honestly. There were too many choices to make.

Full time or part time?
In person immersive or online?
12 week program, 6 month program, or self paced?
Front end or full stack?
Ruby, Python or Javascript?

I hemmed and hawwed. It’s kind of like what people say about having a baby. I was never going to feel “ready” enough to quit my job. For me, I can never have enough money to feel safe. Still, when push came to shove, November was the time for me to quit my job. It just had to happen.

While I prepared to quit my job, I interviewed at a couple of bootcamps in the area, trying to figure out how I would manage the 13 – 18k tuition!!! How much could I safely borrow? Despite having pleasant interviews with several schools, I really didn’t feel 100% about any of these schools. Anyways, at the last minute (October), the Flatiron School announced their Learn Verified program, which was an online web development bootcamp offering a job guarantee! Flatiron was the school my friend went to! Oh! And the price was right!

Curious, I signed up for their ~30 hour free intro to Ruby course, which was a prereq to applying to the program. I found the program’s platform addictive, and the content itself was amusing and in-depth. The intro track was HARD. This was a good sign. Anyways, you know how this turns out. I signed up for Learn Verified.

I started the paid program when it officially launched in November, and while the course has had some bumps along the way, I’ve mostly been happy. I’m learning a ton, and online nature of the course suits my learning style better. I guess we’ll see where it goes, but I’m optimistic.

Code_and_Coffee

Me

Study Tips from the Road

Hump Day

Current Status: In Deep

A Bit of Background