“Hello World!”
My first week in Coding…
Before march of 2020 I was a reasonably successful freelance sound engineer and musician.
When Covid-19 got serious I was working as a senior sound engineer at a 1,000 seat theater, it was a very fun job and something I was naturally great at thanks to growing up in a professional musicians household.
For the past year or so though, I have been contemplating a career change. While I loved what I did, it unfortunately didn’t pay very good and at this point in my life I was about two years married and we wanted to start a family. I quickly realized that unreliable long hours and a poor wage may not be the best path for me anymore.
I started researching many different career choices and figured myself equipt for a few. Most, if not all required going back to school which I didn’t think I had time for prior to Covid-19 striking down upon us with furious rage and violent anger!
Our theater closed its doors in early march and we thought we’d be open by may. As time passed it became obvious that it would be much longer before we returned, I got bored of sitting around worrying about this wonderful industry i’ve been apart of my whole life and not doing much else. I returned my focus on a career change. I needed something stable, something that is surviving this pandemic, but also something fun that I can be passionate about and enjoy, so I came to the conclusion that I want to be a software engineer. I could create apps, games, websites etc.. it seemed right up my alley. After realizing my goal, I spent a lot of time researching the best place to start. Realizing that a bootcamp was the best decision, I researched and found my school.
Now, here’s the scary stuff…
After applying then getting and passing an initial interview and a technical interview, then paying and everything else, you get your pre-work. The pre-work is very important to grasp before your first week in the course, I learned a lot about coding and just what to expect for my future education.
Week one then comes swiftly as if from nowhere, and oh my goodness is it sobering. I like to think of myself as an intelligent person who can learn almost anything given enough time and effort, but the first week of software engineering, had me doubting myself frequently.
Day1 we dive right in, no floaties!
Apart from the sheer knowledge thrown at you there are labs, coding mini challenges and so on, it is a daunting first week. The main focus of the week was OOP or Object-Oriented-Programing.
OOP is essentially less code and more developer centric, it is an approach to problem solving where all computations are carried out using “objects”. we learn and practice this in a coding language named Ruby, “ahh Ruby you crazy, wonderful, enigmatic nightmare!” — if you just started coding, you know.
Throughout the week I feel like I learned a lot but also, a lot went over my head. On Friday we all came together in a zoom call and discussed how we felt about week one, and honestly this calmed me a great deal. It was nice to learn that almost everyone felt the way I did, “yay, I’m not alone!” and I became hopeful that I can do this, so I took a deep breath and enjoyed some of my weekend, while studying what I didn’t understand. By the end of the day on Sunday I felt good and ready for what week two had to throw at me…or so I thought…
WEEK 2 COMING SOON…
