My experience in a (30+ weekly commitment) Coding Boot camp.

Let me start from the beginning of being thwarted towards being part of the U.S. work force.

I had finished my degree studies in December 2008, and as the year turned, in February 2009 I had officially received my Masters Degree from an Ivy League school. I was very proud, as well as very worried because of the economic recession that the country had found itself in.

I searched and searched and searched without much luck. I was looking for an engineering job. However I found myself in NYC. Engineering in the general sense of the term here at the time meant, Civil Engineering, Electrical/Mechanical Engineering focused on Railroad or rail related commuter transit systems, or Software Engineers. I had gotten my degree in Electrical Engineering, and had avoided programming during my coursework like the plague. I coded only in Matlab, and focused mostly on a lot of heavy mathematical concepts during my courses there. Communication Theory, Game Theory, Modulation Techniques, Cryptography, Stochastic Processes. I loved it, but I think it haunted me afterwards.

I didn’t tailor my degree to the job market. Heck, I didn’t understand or could predict how competitive the job market was at the time. When I started the Masters degree in 2007, everything was honky dory.

Getting the degree was a lot of fun, but it was very frustrating to find that every employer was looking for something just out of my reach. They were looking for the perfect candidate. Because of the economy, it was not difficult to find great candidate material, as many had been laid off for a plethora of reasons, and got them to work for peanuts.

But this isn’t about that. This is about my experience programming and starting the programming boot camp.

Let me fast forward a bit. After working at 3 companies in the past 6 years, and at one company being on a roller coaster ride pre-acquisition and post-acquisition, I was left a bit ragged.

I had focused on Fiber Optics, as well as Layer 2/Layer 3 networking devices. This industry gets stale, and to be quite frank, doesn’t really differentiate well in the market nowadays. All certificates that used to play a bigger role in differentiating you professionally have been watered down. For example, a CCNA 10 years ago weighed a lot more than it does now. The big players are huge, the small players all have interesting products, but are unproven in terms of reliability. From that perspective it’s a gamble on hardware. Hardware is being virtualized, so long term, more services will get consolidated into a single box, and the play will be software.

And of course in the back of my mind, all this time, I was telling myself, I can do better.

My experience at Bloc, which is the company that I chose to do the Software Developer boot camp, has been great. Mainly because it is focused. All the work that we’ve done, is given in the context of production. Let me explain.

The first Module set the groundwork for the rest of the projects. There was a lot of information. All this is necessary to move forward to the projects. But there was always someone there to ask, talk to about code, shoot back and fourth about problems they’ve had, problems I’ve encountered, and also talk about the real world issues that come up. Because real world is where we’re going to be looking for jobs, dealing with real life problems, and getting paid to solve them.

Secondly, there is also the “wake up” call that at the end of the coursework, you’re going to have to show your value to your employer. That is incorporated quite well, and it’s good to have that churning in the back of your head. Looking at verticals, finding what you like, what you don’t like, find what you gravitate towards, then also start to look at meet ups, places where you can actually get a face to face with someone and talk about wanting to break into programming and being a software developer.

During my Masters, a professor suggested we spend a little bit of time each week thinking about our final course project at the end of week 16. Even if we didn’t have anything chosen by the 2nd week (we had to have chosen a project by week 4 and have a small report written with a rough draft of how we would attack solving the problem), it’ll be in the back of your head subconsciously. Once you have your topic, if you continue to work bit by bit, same thing, you’ll continue to think about this subconsciously and move towards achieving that goal. He acknowledged that of course, the 3-4 weeks prior to handing in the project, we would be spending much more time working on it, and hence thinking about it. However, those weeks leading up to it, just having it in the back of your head would be beneficial.

I feel the boot camp does that, in the sense that it’s pushing you to show your value to your current and future employers, and staying current with how you’re going to be marketable.

Also, Mentors are great. They are there to guide you through the pain, and help out as much as they can. I enjoy the interactions I’ve had with Kevin Lowe and Phil Spitler. They have been great, patient mentors to me so far, and want to continue to work with t hem.

Finally, I have to say that the pace, although tight and time demanding, allows me to actually WORK! While achieving this professional level of coding expertise!

When I started to search for boot camps, I had a ‘coming to Jesus’ moment. I had been ‘separated’ (their words, not mine) from my job at the acquiring company and was left with a decision as to where to go next.

I had always desired to work as a programmer, in something open source related, and make improvements in computing and telecom industries.

This was my chance. However, the boot camps that I had ran into were way to intensive. I couldn’t give up earning an income just to do an 80+ hour a week boot camp, then start searching for a job! That would require at least 6-8 months of funding on my part, without even touching upon health insurance.

So far Bloc has been great in many ways, since it is helping me achieve these steps towards being a relevant software developer with professional experience. This is something that I couldn’t pick up from other methods of study such as Coursera, or from my academic background.