Today (August 11, 2011) marks exactly 81 days since I walked into Awesome Inc for the first classroom session of a three-month-long Developer Bootcamp. It seems like it was years ago but at the same time I feel like I just started this thing last week.
The first day, May 22, had me way out of my comfort zone. People were speaking a undiscernable language. I was in La-La Land for three weeks. I was actually wondering if I could become a developer. I questioned whether or not I was making the right decision.
There’s something that a lot of people reading this will know about me and that’s two different things. Firstly, I don’t have a hard time picking things up. It’s something my wife often gives me a bunch of grief about but it’s God-given. Secondly, I’m ultra-competitve and I want to be the BEST at everything. I can make anything into a competition and that might be a byproduct of growing up in a house of all boys. It’s God-given. LOL!
To my point, though, I struggled mightily. I was lost. In the middle of the ocean in a little john-boat kind of lost. I just wasn’t getting it.
Then, one day, something just clicked. Maybe it was the six or more hours a day outside of the 8-5 classroom time that I was putting in. Maybe it was all the failures I encountered along that route. Maybe it was all the documentation I read on AngularJS, Laravel, PHP, Gulp, JavaScript, Gander, PostgreSQL, and Sublime. (It’s up to you to determine which of those is the fake thing. And I made one or more of them up but chances might be that it’s a real thing, too.)
Whatever the reason I finally got it. It was like I was running up the world’s longest hill and when I finally got the top there was a soap-box car waiting for me. I jumped in that car, and while it’s not a 250K Lamborghini, that sucker still can pick up some speed on a big enough hill.
And it did.
From about three weeks into this journey I’ve been picking up a ton of speed. We learned two programming languages, we picked up two frameworks, we learned database management stuff. We got to version 1 of a two-week team project that revolved around IP Address Management. And that brings me to the last two weeks. Well, actually 10 days.
For the past 10 days I’ve been putting together my final project. By myself, 12-15 hours a day, I tried to put together something to showcase to potential employers and ‘WOW’ them with two-minute introduction and a hands-on demo.
My project, a tinder-style app to help you and your group of friends or your hot date make a quick, non-confrontational way of deciding where to eat that night. So for version one of my 10-day sprint I can up with this app. It’s bug-riddled. It takes forever to load sometimes. But for the most part it does what I want it to do and it’s a good first step into a pretty good idea.
Take a look for yourself. Here’s a link to SWiTHER. Enjoy this a little bit. Create an account and log-in. Create a group. Try it out. It’s pretty cool, in my opinion.
(NOTE: If you go to register and nothing happens it’s the way the websites work that I’m using. Give it a minute and try to log in with the credentials you just tried to register with. It’s version 1 after all)
So back to my original idea for this post.
There’s a significance in today. It’s the last day of the Bootcamp. It’s the finish of something that took a ton of faith even starting. It’s also the start of something new. Something yet to be determined. Something scary. Something exciting.
Today I got to the finish line, which also happens to be the start line, too. Interesting course for sure.
I appreciate your help and support in this for me. Thanks for reading.
Thanks for reading!
Josh