Bootcamp - Why I joined and how it went.

I have been very busy these last few month and have not posted much to steem.
It's not that I abandoned Steem, far from it. I have just been really busy learning full stack development.

In this post I'm going to reflect on some of my reasons for joining an immersive bootcamp, a little bit about my personal story and some details on my next steps.

My passion for coding started at an early age. I am 33 years old as of writing and I grew up in the UK in the age of the amiga 500+ / The sega mega drive / The NES and the SNES / The playstation / The Sega Saturn / N64 .....
And on and on.
I wouldn't say I am a gamer either. Not anymore.. My first PC was bought from PC world. It had windows ME pre installed.

I remember being really small and having access to an apple macintosh. I'm not sure where it came from but I remember sitting with it's mouse clicking away trying to find out how to get the games on the thing.
On the amiga I had more success. I was a whizz at it. I even had a steady stream of Copy X games.
After a couple of month of Windows ME and the dial up internet I discovered that operating systems on PC are not final. There was options...

I first tried dual booting linux with my windows ME and that was good for a while, but eventually it wasn't enough. I learnt about hacking and the heroes of the counterculture, I stayed up late reading tutorials on hacking and finding out about the MIT model railway club, I became proficient at using telnet to browse websites and using nmap to scan for ports. In my more advanced nights I searched for vulnerable servers and tried out some exploits I had downloaded. I had a free shell account and really thought I was a 1337 h4x0r, in the irc channels I would frequent I denied that I was just a script kiddy.

I left school at 16 and had drifted in and out of computers but before I left it to the darkness of my past I took on a home computer programming qualification for a city and guilds in C/C++.
I spent weeks completing the at home portion and I would send my work away through the post to be marked by my designated tutor. After I had completed the at home portion the next step was to attend and in person classroom session to finish the first part of the course. As luck would have it the company went into liquidation and I never got to visit in person. I kinda drifted away from my geeky exploits and became very physically active and pursued more outdoor pleasures. I was a bit older by then and my personal life had changed a lot. The North East UK was not silicon valley to be immersed in computers was not common.

Fast forward to 2018 and I find myself living in New York. I began studying Python online and found that I still had a knack for coding and problem solving so I decided to look into Bootcamps..

I started in February 2019 at the flatiron fullstack immersive. I had no idea what to expect. I hoped I would come away with more knowledge than when I went in. I was right. I am now comfortable at building web apps from the front and the back.
It has been an intense learning experience for me and one I would recommend to anyone thinking of pursuing a career in web development. It is not easy mind. It is not for those that give up easily.

I have been tested to the edge of my wits and pushed beyond. Coding is a skill that you will only develop with practise and discipline. Even then you need to grow your knowledge of the what and the why.

In my time here I have learned to find answers. I think I am still a script kiddy at heart and now I feel mature enough to admit I am a script kiddy. After all I'm not the engineer building React I am the developer using it. I would love to learn more and get deeper into programming and I think as time progresses I will find a good mentor in life who will be able to open new doors for me. Till then I will keep hacking my way through it.

Coding is a great skill to delve into and it is extremely rewarding when you code something from scratch and get to see your idea come alive before you. For anyone thinking of getting into, before you pay out any money, learn all you can online. I started learning python with edx.org. I also recommend UDemy for tutorials and of course youtube has an endless amount of free content to get you started. Also Steemit has some great users who post many coding tutorials. I follow a few of them. Checkout @ilovecoding for content...