APPLYING TO NORTHCODERS
Before sitting the Entry Challenge, Northcoders sent some prep material such as FreeCodeCamp to get a feel of what it's all about. I found it fun and interesting as I’ve no exposure beforehand. I found myself coming back to it everyday, no matter how soul destroying the previous day was. Tutors held drop in sessions to help with prep material and got support via the Northcoders Slack Channel.
THE ENTRY CHALLENGE
I studied relentlessly from 8am to 9pm everyday. Life was on hold. Sitting in my children's bedroom on their study desk with a dodgy chair...the backaches were the start of many things to come.
It was the month of Ramadan too, tethering on the verge of a heatwave, the struggle was real. The Entry Challenge day arrived, 3 days before the start date of the course. There was a time limit during the challenge but no one watching over me so it was relaxed. I even called a tutor via zoom to help me when I got stuck. I was lucky, I did it !
I had a basic understanding of variables, loops, arrays, objects and indirect debugging. I even got my head around nested arrays..ish ! I played around on CodeWars 8kyu and soon enough learnt that its better to have 10 lines of code that makes sense than a one liner that isn’t self explanatory.
I had three days, courtesy of a Bank Holiday, to get a new operating system installed on my current laptop alongside a load of apps I had never heard of. Embarrassingly, I only knew of Windows OS so to install Ubuntu OS was terrifying. Of course it failed to install first time round...a sign of many things to come.
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