My Coder Academy Bootcamp Journey

I have a Master’s degree in Information Systems and when I graduated, I realised that I lack the required business experience and technical experience to get a job. It was a heart-breaking moment for me and the only job that I could get was in IT support. I worked there for a year and I did excel while working there. I was an IT helpdesk support technician and was working in Perth with some of the largest multinational corporations such as Chevron and BHP Billiton. I was highly paid but did not have job satisfaction. After one year I quit but didn’t want to go to University again and repeat the same cycle of lack of experience. Surprisingly, Universities cannot provide an internship to their students that lays the basic foundation for someone changing careers to get their foot in the door. Luckily, I found Coder Academy (CA) which was providing internships for all their students. It helped me bridge the gap between education and industry. I was hired after my internship by the same company and many other of my classmates also got the job via the internship. Coder Academy has included building a portfolio which is very impressive to some of my potential employers. Also, the side projects we did during the course gave me something to show my coding skills and interviewers something to talk about in the interview. It was a very intensive course and at times I felt breaking down due to pressure and timely submission of projects. Many of my classmates felt giving up the course multiple time during the course. But it was all worthwhile in the end.
In my cohort, the course was divided into three terms. In the first term, we started the course with Ruby as it is really easy to learn and built a terminal application. Then we moved on to Ruby on Rails in the second term and built a two-sided e-commerce website. Then in the third term had MERN/PERN stack and built something of our choice. This project was supposed to be a client project to give us a feeling of the real world, but COVID happened and the project was changed.
During the course, we got a fair amount of support from educators, but not enough. Most of the times I found myself dealing with my problems by myself. That acted as a blessing in disguise, as in the real world being independent and able to solve the coding issue fast and on my own has helped me impress my employers.
I did feel that Ruby and Rails are a bit outdated technology and not many people use it. But guess what, as I’m writing this, I’m moving to my second job and it is in React/Rails stack. But definitely, there are few jobs for Rails and more for PHP and C# .NET stack for the backend. It would have been great to include these stacks but can be learned on my own.
I also found that the material covered in flex track was more in details and the projects were not rushed as they were for us in the fast track. I’ll suggest someone coming from a non-technical background, it would be easier to pursue flex track which is 10 months course. It will be 4 more months compared to fast track, but definitely worth the time as the curriculum has heaps of concepts that overwhelmed many of my classmates many times during the course.
Overall, I would say it was a great experience. It was stressful and intense and I’d say not for everyone. But if one is focused and determined, I believe it is worth the effort and time one put into it.