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Discussion on: Web development boot camp grad, ask me anything.

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bresson profile image
Bresson B

What would you say to someone considering a bootcamp versus courses available via MOOCs ( Algorithms from Princeton, CS from MIT, Paradigms of Computing from Louvain, Software Development Micromaster from UBC, etc )? Thank you!

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terrancecorley profile image
Terrance Corley

I think the answer is always subjective to a person's situation. I was teaching myself code on the side for 2 years before leaving my full-time job to attend a coding bootcamp. I live in a rural area so there aren't a lot of web dev jobs out here. I felt like my learning was slow, inconsistent, and the bootcamp offered me structure, assistance staff, a personal mentor, the ability to work on teams with other developers, and a job guarantee.

Now if I lived in a bigger city that had more developer positions and wasn't in a huge hurry to switch careers, I may have just stuck it out with self teaching until I landed a gig. Just depends on what you want and how fast you want it, I can definitely say the program accelerated my learning by a lot.

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bresson profile image
Bresson B

I keep forgetting about the role of geography. Budding devs in bigger cities can go to meetups, more than likely they have an engineering department at work which they can befriend, etc. Having access to these opportunities can make all the difference. I can definitely see the reasons a bootcamp is the best decision.

Congratulations and best of luck!

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terrancecorley profile image
Terrance Corley

Exactly.

Thanks Bresson! Best of luck to you as well!