<commit_before>---
layout: post
title:  "The Journey to Flatiron Pt. 1"
date:   2017-02-09 13:15:13 -0500
---


I liked my job but I was feeling stagnant. I liked my coworkers, I generally enjoyed my day-to-day, but it was also clear that I was learning anymore.There were things here and there, but I felt that it was becoming routine and I didn’t want to let myself lose momentum. Above all, I didn’t want to see myself working there in 5 years, or even 2 years. It no longer felt meaningful. In June of 2016, I made a promise to myself that by the end of the year, I would have a concrete change in place. Whether that meant another job or going back to school, I promised I would make real plans. 

The idea of a coding bootcamp was something that I had heard about summer of 2015. My brother, Peter, had just finished a year teaching abroad and had decided a thing or two about what he did not want to do for work. He had talked with some graduates of a bootcamp in web development(I can’t recall which) who spoke about their specific program and also the concept in general. On paper, it’s a pretty neat idea: 12 weeks of programming day and night. The consensus was ~85 hours a week of work between classes and assignments so a social life was out of the question, as was holding down a job- even part time. You didn’t even need any prior experience as a coder. But most people reported multiple job offers after these bootcamps, often within weeks of graduating and at relatively high salaries. 

Peter was accepted to App Academy for February of 2016 and the idea of attending a bootcamp definitely grabbed my interest most at that moment. I did a lot of research about the various programs, what people liked about them, how difficult each was to get into. I also started to learn Ruby, the language many Bootcamps ask you to learn when applying, to get the hang of it. My coding journey began with CodeAcademy’s online course. 

![](http://giphy.com/gifs/ruby-yr6hacGy4QKGY)

It was fun. The course showed me a lot of material; string manipulation, arrays, looping, iterators, conditionals, hashes, object orientation. I tried to do a little bit every day for a few weeks and was introduced to more and more concepts. Finally, I finished the Ruby course and was ready to take on the world. The internet led me to Project Euler- a compilation of programming challenges. Fairly math heavy. I was able to solve one or two but was frustrated by my inability to break down the problem into smaller pieces. I abandoned Project Euler and looked elsewhere for coding challenges but was greeted with similar experiences. In hindsight, for all the material I had learned, I hadn’t picked up how to think like a programmer yet. So when I tried to solve the practice problems provided for an App Academy application, I was just as lost. Fortunately, these practice problems came with practice solutions. I looked at the solution for each of the first few problems that had stumped me and saw the themes. The use of basic loops and conditionals to solve more complex problems. I rewrote the answers. I came back the next day and solved the problems and then went on to another. I slowly taught myself how break down each problem into the elemental problems that I did know how to solve. This was my ‘aha’ moment and when February came around I knew that if I worked hard and applied myself, programming was something I could tackle. 


<commit_msg>Updating my blog post.<commit_after>---
layout: post
title:  "The Journey to Flatiron Pt. 1"
date:   2017-02-09 13:15:13 -0500
---


I liked my job but I was feeling stagnant. I liked my coworkers, I generally enjoyed my day-to-day, but it was also clear that I was learning anymore.There were things here and there, but I felt that it was becoming routine and I didn’t want to let myself lose momentum. Above all, I didn’t want to see myself working there in 5 years, or even 2 years. It no longer felt meaningful. In June of 2016, I made a promise to myself that by the end of the year, I would have a concrete change in place. Whether that meant another job or going back to school, I promised I would make real plans. 

The idea of a coding bootcamp was something that I had heard about summer of 2015. My brother, Peter, had just finished a year teaching abroad and had decided a thing or two about what he did not want to do for work. He had talked with some graduates of a bootcamp in web development(I can’t recall which) who spoke about their specific program and also the concept in general. On paper, it’s a pretty neat idea: 12 weeks of programming day and night. The consensus was ~85 hours a week of work between classes and assignments so a social life was out of the question, as was holding down a job- even part time. You didn’t even need any prior experience as a coder. But most people reported multiple job offers after these bootcamps, often within weeks of graduating and at relatively high salaries. 

Peter was accepted to App Academy for February of 2016 and the idea of attending a bootcamp definitely grabbed my interest most at that moment. I did a lot of research about the various programs, what people liked about them, how difficult each was to get into. I also started to learn Ruby, the language many Bootcamps ask you to learn when applying, to get the hang of it. My coding journey began with CodeAcademy’s online course. 

It was fun. The course showed me a lot of material; string manipulation, arrays, looping, iterators, conditionals, hashes, object orientation. I tried to do a little bit every day for a few weeks and was introduced to more and more concepts. Finally, I finished the Ruby course and was ready to take on the world. The internet led me to Project Euler- a compilation of programming challenges. Fairly math heavy. I was able to solve one or two but was frustrated by my inability to break down the problem into smaller pieces. I abandoned Project Euler and looked elsewhere for coding challenges but was greeted with similar experiences. In hindsight, for all the material I had learned, I hadn’t picked up how to think like a programmer yet. So when I tried to solve the practice problems provided for an App Academy application, I was just as lost. Fortunately, these practice problems came with practice solutions. I looked at the solution for each of the first few problems that had stumped me and saw the themes. The use of basic loops and conditionals to solve more complex problems. I rewrote the answers. I came back the next day and solved the problems and then went on to another. I slowly taught myself how break down each problem into the elemental problems that I did know how to solve. This was my ‘aha’ moment and when February came around I knew that if I worked hard and applied myself, programming was something I could tackle. 



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