I think i’ve been dipping my toes into the waters of programming for about 10 years without seriously committing to it. There was always some internal resistance to it. I would progress through various courses and then for some inexplicable reason stop and not pick up where I left off. I had thought about doing a coding bootcamp since about 2019 but I couldn’t justify leaving my well-paying job at the time to take a chance on that.
A few months into my career break I started to seriously consider software engineering as a new career direction. Many of my friends are software engineers and I always appreciated and deeply respect the act of creation that was inherent in it.
I always liked python as a language because it was clean and easy to build things in, so I decided to do the Introductory and Intermediate courses on Profound Academy. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about the fundamental of programming, OOP and testing. I moved on to doing bioinformatics problems in the Rosalind stronghold because I was toying with the idea of going back to uni for bioinformatics or biochem. The puzzles were fun and I was really hooked on programming.
At this point I had crossed enough of the terrain and was enjoying it enough that I was going to give this a real crack. The thing I really felt called towards was learning how to build beautiful and useful products. Whenever I was involved with product related work at CBA I felt so much more alive and interested than in purely analytical work. I think at heart i’m a feelings and emotions and human connection kinda guy and I like interacting with people to understand what they really want.
So I decided to pivot over to FullStack Javascript. So i’ve been on that journey for about 7-8 months and it’s really starting to bear fruit! There’s so much breadth and depth in software development that it can be quite overwhelming. But taking it one concept at a time helps. Learning something new every day and consolidating it into my understanding through project work really helps. I made my way through most of Fullstack Open and I can just build stuff that I think of now, which is pretty cool!
At this point I have a fairly solid grasp of Javascript, React, Node, ExpressJS and MondoDB. I’m starting to branch into Typescript and working with relational databases as well. I can build a React frontend/Express backend app pretty quickly and understand most of the concepts around statefulness and RESTful APIs.
I like building things — it’s amazing to see things come together and really understand how it all works. I have a deeper and deeper appreciation for how complex everything is, especially those things that seem simple on the outside.
So that’s where i’m at as of September 2024. I feel like my fullstack fundamentals are pretty good and i’m about to undertake a fully immersive 3-month software engineering bootcamp in Brooklyn NY focused on rapidly improving my ability to ship products, understand the engineering component of software engineering, and better learn how to integrate LLMs into my coding workflow.
I’ll keep track of my progress here — feel free to follow along.
My goal at the end of the bootcamp is to try and get a job at Ferocia. Let’s see if I can pull it off.