Forget your expectations, and get ready for a ride. That’s what I would have told myself when I was starting this course and I’m only half-way through. It’s better than I could have hoped – but not in the way I expected.
Coming from a scientific background, I felt secure in my thoughts that I could handle the technical demands of the course so long as I stayed focused. I had assumptions about coding and how to learn it from my own experiences, but no idea how developer teams work day to day.
You can probably guess where this is going – those assumptions were mercilessly shredded. I loved it (despite pioneering the conspiracy theory that CSS styling is a secret service torture method) and soaked it up like a sponge, excited to be finally let into a world I have found so interesting for so long. The trainers, Ollie and Shea, are incredible, and you gradually realise they know you better than yourself. They quite literally predict your future actions (again, secret service?). You are truly willed toward success and your best self. Add the soft-skills training in and I already feel like ten times the person I was when I started.
The group dynamic is an important part of the process too. With such a diverse range of backgrounds, and as the youngest member I learn so much from all of them every day. We are so willing to help one another and love to see each other succeed. This has catapulted us all forward faster than Ollie and Shea expected. One couldn’t hope for a better learning group and environment. I couldn’t wipe the smile off of my face this week when our team project started to come together. We are working together to make it the best it can be. For the first time I felt like a developer. That was pretty cool.
If you are looking for an indication of how much coding has completely taken over my mind, I caught myself thinking about a test-driven development approach to my dinner recipes. I now think about my ballet and tap routines in terms of functions and I dreamt I was physically stuck in an Angular component and couldn’t get out. And if you think coding isn’t creative – think again. You need to exercise cunning to master languages that were largely built by a group of nerds on acid in Xerox’s research labs a few decades ago. It’s an amazing community to be a part of. No challenge is ever the same.
Oh, and GIT is pure genius. Branches, feature-branches, committing, love it! It’s bonkers clever.
Anyway. I’ve got some red/green/refactoring to do, a website to rebuild in Angular, and a few boxes to move a pixel to the left, and an API to master.
Oh, and this is the other thing I’ve learnt. You’re never done. That’s great. A bottomless bucket of problem-solving dopamine? What more could you ask for?
Remember: hug your errors!