My choice to join a coding bootcamp

When I was looking to break into the tech industry and saw the variety of ways it can be done, I stumbled across websites like dev.to, hoping to find any insight I could into the best ways to progress.

Fast-forward a few months and I've found myself on a coding bootcamp in London, the most excited I've been about the career I am pursuing since I was chasing a career in basketball, and I'm really happy with the way I'm going about it. That's why I have decided to write about my experience on the bootcamp; maybe it will give another wide-eyed amateur developer one more perspective to consider in their research.

Quick Note: I think it's quite important to understand the context of my decision to join the bootcamp before I go into detail of my experience. Because of that, in this post I will simply focus on what lead to my choice to join the bootcamp.

My somewhat related academics

Going back a few years now, I was fortunate to find myself on a basketball scholarship at Saint Leo University, Florida, which ultimately allowed me to gain a BA in Mathematics.

When I graduated in 2014 I sought advice from others about possible career paths as I'd never really invested much thought into it (I was just happy I was getting a degree). I had been told for years how valuable a Maths degree would be and that it would open many doors for me, yet when it came to actually labelling those doors the only leads I could get from people were "teacher" and "accountant", two things I had zero interest in pursuing.

In hindsight, moving towards the technology industry seems like an intuitive and common move, yet just a touch under 6 years ago, it apparently didn't cross anyone's mind (that I talked with anyway).

The next 5-years in 2 paragraphs

With such a lack of sense of direction, you can imagine it's meant I've bounced around a few different jobs in different industries; Managing a Fundraising Team, PPI Investigation Officer, Academic Learning Mentor, even a Personal Trainer, and most recently Graduate Recruiter.

All of these stops teaching me skills that I've carried forward like sales, effective learning disciplines, commercial awareness, management and many more. Yet none of the industries and jobs themselves giving me personal satisfaction and fulfilment, something I of course "crave" as a Millenial.

It was my most recent stop that really opened my eyes and what made me stumble into the tech industry.

My discovery of tech

This really came down to a few ingredients; my age, my living situation, my job. So let's break them down quickly...

My age

I want to start here because it's the most macro view of this decision. At 28 years old and 11 months, last April I decided to move to London to pursue a new career in recruitment. I was getting closer to 30 and had grown tired of bouncing around jobs; I wanted to focus on a career.

Having always excelled in my job roles, I felt recruitment gave me the opportunity to get true recognition for my work ethic (as there was uncapped commission involved), so I accepted a job and made the move.

Turns out, although the recognition was something I wanted, the lifestyle of a recruiter was not for me at all! I found myself prioritising my work phone over personal life, living with alternative agendas to almost every client/candidate I spoke with and a lot of social drinking.

Although recruitment didn't work out for me, I taught me a very important thing; at my age, I know myself fairly well and I know what I like...and what I don't like! This meant for me, when deciding to move on from recruitment, I wanted to put myself in a position where I actually liked not only the benefits of the job (that commission sounded pretty sweet!), but also the role itself and the lifestyle that came with it.

Unfortunately, this isn't a piece of advice I can give for making career decisions, because it's experience that has taught me about myself allowing me to know I'm now going in the right direction, and that only comes with age.

My living situation

When I moved to London, I joined a flat-share and found myself living with a developer from Spain. At the time of moving in, I thought it was interesting, but interesting like "that's cool", nothing more.

We often had chats about projects he was working on and I liked the idea that he had the ability to create something from scratch, he just had to have the idea and then put in the work.

It wasn't until I was moving out of this flat that I started to discover an interest in coding. My flatmate and I had a few discussions and his biggest advice to me was to try learning a language and see if I enjoy it. He warned me it can get really frustrating trying to solve errors all day, so if I don't like problem solving, it may not be for me. Little did he know, problem solving is one of my favourite past-times.

Then I moved into a house, and you'll never guess what...another developer! This time a senior developer that manages a team. We've had a good few chats, and the thing that I loved most about the chats was the sense of passion I got from him immediately as he talked about coding. He encouraged me to spend time learning also and discussed with me a few different technologies.

These were my first exposures with people in the industry, and both lead me to look into this career more seriously.

My job

Working as a recruiter, you speak to a LOT of people! And being that I was in graduate recruitment, I spoke to a lot of young adults that honestly had no idea what they wanted to do. It was part of my job to go through that discovery with them and help them figure it out. Funny how much that rubbed off on me!

When you quiz someone on what they want out of a career, and all the different factors that come into play, you start to realise how little of these factors you've considered in your own decision making. It really put me in a position where I was evaluating by the day what I wanted and if those criteria were being fulfilled. It was the first time I was asking myself some of these questions.

On top of this self-discovery I was continually going through, we were also in a business transition that meant business developing in different areas. I spent a lot of time looking at potential clients in tech as it is a booming industry. In my research, I learned a lot about the lifestyle factors that come along with a job as a dev. This aligning with my desire to truly pursue a career, and getting advice from my flatmates/housemates, everything was pointing towards me making the move.

My new passion

As advised by my former flatmate and current housemate, I started dabbling with some coding...

At first I looked into Java as it was the term I was most familiar with, although I had no true idea of what I was doing. I was trying to learn alongside work, but work was consuming all of my mental energy and I was only getting about 1-hour a week of study in. This clearly was not ideal.

However, even with this small exposure, I did notice a lot of joy when I got to spend time learning. I had never enjoyed learning my entire life, so this was new. I felt like when I was looking at the code, I was looking at my brain on a screen (it's the only way I can think to describe it).

After a couple months of trying to learn like this, it wasn't quenching my thirst for learning the language. I had decided I was going to leave my job at Christmas and spend a month or two learning before pursuing some jobs; optimistic, I realise, but I planned on investing most of my waking hours into this.

My job was starting to get to me more and more, and I wanted out sooner rather than later, but I was committed to the cause. Apparently the stars were going to align for me and I was let go of my job a month earlier than I had planned to leave. Now this may sound like a bad thing, but as my dad always told me "every cloud has a silver lining"; It wasn't until I left the office that I realised how much of a burden of stress was weighing on my shoulders, because it was immediately lifted!

As soon as I got home, I jumped on Udemy and started a JavaScript course. I was advised it might be a better approach than Java, and turns out it was great advice!

I was so excited by learning JS that it was all I did from then on...

My choice: time for the bootcamp

During this new phase of learning, I decided to join a few meetups here in London and go to their events. In this I found myself at the Kodiri meetup promoting their January cohort.

At this point, all my learning was self-taught and I thought everything was going great. I was able to build some basic functioning web-apps and was excited about developing these further and building out a portfolio. Then I went to a React meetup and realised I knew nothing!

What was very apparent to me during my experience learning and then at the meetups, was that I learned very quickly and retained the information quite well. As it's a very logic driven industry, I felt I was just learning maths in a different language; I just had to translate. What was also apparent was that I was missing out on the opportunity to learn from others and even check if what I was doing was correct/efficient.

My biggest reservation when looking at a bootcamp was the same I held for all forms of education, pacing. Whether I would be slower or faster than those around me, would I be able to move at my own pace? Turns out, with Kodiri, yes.

Not only did Ricardo (the founder) consider things such as pacing, he paid attention to the entire format of the bootcamp and structured it very specifically. I had lots of questions for him and he answered them all to my pleasure.

The bootcamp covers JavaScript, React, NodeJs and everything needed in between, and is set up to mimic the working environment; e.g. we start each day with a standup, we do pair programming, we use slack etc. This was a big deal for me as it demonstrated that Kodiri were invested in me getting a job, not just learning technical skills.

My conclusion

What really and truly lead me to join the Kodiri bootcamp was a few different things, but it all boils down to; my ability to learn quickly from others being maximised in this setting, the structure of the bootcamp being individually paced and aimed at landing a job, and that I was currently not working and planning to take the time to learn on my own anyway. Not to mention, the price is extremely reasonable compared to many other bootcamps!

This is the first time I've invested into learning about my industry before jumping in. I'm investing in myself before any employer invests in me, and I know that I'm doing the right thing for me. I haven't felt a passion or desire for something like this since I played basketball. I can't wait to see where this leads me!

I will be going into much more detail of the structure of the bootcamp and what we've been getting up to in later posts, but I hope this has given some insight into why I personally chose the bootcamp route. It's not for everyone, it just so happened to be for me.