My journey at Dev Bootcamp has come to an end. As I look back on my experience, I can't help but feel an overwelming sense of accomplishment. From having thoughts of never being able to learn how to code, to completing full funcitoning web applications has made me a stronger person. The confidence that I gained from this experience is not anything like I have ever felt.
From my blog post about how at my age, I felt that it would be next to impossible to learn somethine new. Let alone something that isn't easy for most. (Check out that Post!) I'm not going to lie, the first 3 weeks of the onsite portion of the course was very demanding and had me questioning my decision to take on the challenge. However, my cohort mates and instructors cheered me on. With thier support and the support of my family, I was able to break through a barrier which I thought was pivotal in my learning. I had to learn to deal with the confusion of learning at such a fast pace. The ability to hold on to concepts was very difficult. As my brain started to adapt at the pace of learning, and teaching myself how to learn, I was able to make it through the first phase of the curriculum.
With the foundations of programming utilizing the Ruby language, I entered the second phase and the world of Ruby on Rails. I was then faced with a new challenge. This phase for me, required much more memorization and the development of muscle memory. This was very different from the first phase as it was more focused on critical thinking and problem solving using programming. This was direct application of that skillset to build web applications. Although it wasn't easy, I found it much more enjoyable as I could see the fruits of my labor come to life on a web page. Learning to use AJAX as a way to make my applications faster and have less calls to eh database and learning JavaScript to interact with the users of my applications was fun and eye opening.
The third phase at Dev Bootcamp is more designed to start having the students working as if they were in a work enviornment. There is far less instruction from the teachers, and more discovery by yourself. We had to build web applications for our final projects from ideas that we pitched as a group. The ideas were voted on and teams were formed. From there, we talked about the different technologies we were interested in using to build our applications. From technologies we learned during our time at Dev Bootcamp as well as new technologies we would have to teach ourselves in a very short time span. We were given a total of 7 days to build our applications from scratch. I must say that it was one of the hardest times I have worked on anything in my life. Working 14 hour days for almost all 7 days was very grueling but also very rewarding.
Even with some days being extremely difficult and feeling defeated, I feel that the times of feeling the accomplishment of completing the course and walking out with the skills I need to enter the web development industry has been amazing. I would not trade this time for anything. I would never have been able to learn the amount I did in such a short period of time on my own. Dev Bootcamp and it's curriculum is set up for success and I ma glad to have been a part of it.