Intensive and fun Online Bootcamp
After having many starts and stops with jobs where I was undervalued and underpaid, my common place was the wall. It was December of 2019 where I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my career. Seemingly out of nowhere, my wife encouraged me to check out CodingDojo. Given my past dabbling in HTML, I figured "Why not, what elese do I have to lose?" Accepting this new challenge, we paid for the bootcamp and started taking steps towards what would become my new drive and passion.
What I was not prepared for was challenges that followed. Within 2020, Covid-19 ravaged the world and changed everything as we know it. My then job and it's working conditions worsened where it (purposely) messed with my schedule, I battled with depression and anxiety, all while my wife was pregnant! I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and wanted to give up. All of these situations came to a head where I ended up failing the Python exam. I was devastated and discouraged, but all I could think about was my wife, our daughter, and where I wanted to take my career. Even though a lot was going on around me, I needed to focus on the day at hand.
At CodingDojo, an opportunity opened up to retake the course and I jumped right on it. This time around, I was going to focus and take it a day at a time, without putting pressure on myself. I dedicated time to go over what was covered previously while learning what was missed. Even as I struggled, Devon (instructor) encouraged to treat it like I'm learning a new martial art or video game; I put in the time to learn each line of code like it's a new strike or move. Keeping this in mind, I pushed on, passed my exam and was able to move on to creating a final project with my classmates and presenting it for our graduation ceremony!
Doing a coding bootcamp is something I will always appreciate and cherish in spite of the challenges thrown my way. Even after completing the bootcamp, it gave me more comfort and confidence to explore new languages and frameworks to experiment and complete more projects. I am a developer and I am looking forward to what's ahead of me.
This was a fun class that allowed me to flex my creativity muscles. Shannon Steen was my instructor for this course and we covered a lot on design and placement. From doing mock ups of blog sites, to an UI of instagram, there was a lot of cool HTML/CSS designs that we used and the class gave room to brainstorm and experiment css coding and arrangements. What was challenging for me was making sure my defined classes matched what I was specifically designing. Either I misspell a word or mixed up the div class, I developed a good practice to code, test, and check.This was a great course and for my exam I was tasked to recreate a web page I earned a Yellow Belt!
Python was a difficult, yet awesome course to learn. It was my first time writing the language to become a "Pythonista". My first instructor was Amanda Russell and my second being Devon Newsome. These two were vital for me during this time of learning and have been extremely supportive and encouraging during my hardships outside of coding. Initially, I was learning to code Python with framework Flask. However, after retaking the course I was using Django. In this course alongside Python, I was learning to build databases with MySQL, establish servers, encrypt data, and authentications. My exam was to create a quotes website with a log-in and registration,the ability for the user to edit their personal information, create/post/delete quotes and authors, like/comment on other user posts, and like them. It took awhile as I was nervous working on it, but I prevailed and got an Orange Belt to pass the exam.
