Staying Productive

I'm a big proponent of learning on your own. I don't think it's the only way to go about learning a programming language or software development in general, nor is it probably the most efficient. If I had the luxury to take 3 to 5 months off work, attend a bootcamp, and pop out the other end ready to enter the workforce, I may be a lot better off. It would have saved me a lot of time and my studies would have been much more intense. That's not to say the last 10 months haven't been intense; I just had to work my study time around my work and family schedule, studying only whenever I could fit it in. If you go to a bootcamp, you are learning software development for 8 or 9 hours a day, at least. You're also surrounded by people who are learning the same things, offering you plenty of opportunities to pair program and level up with a herd mentality. You have access to instructors that can answer any kinds of questions you might have, and will get the answers you need with little effort. You have access to the bootcamp's network of companies that may be interested in hiring you when the bootcamp is complete. There's a lot of perks to doing a bootcamp, and I definitely see the merit in them. It's a different route, and it's certainly effective, but I'm not convinced it's a better route.

What have I gained or learned that I wouldn't otherwise at a bootcamp. Well, for starters, I had to learn how I learn best. I started out taking coursework through the Odin Project, which I'm a big fan of, but quickly realized it didn't mesh with my learning style. Most of the material given was straight out of the MDN documentation or W3Schools, which are both great resources, but it's tough to learn with this alone. After a lot of frustration and hitting serious roadblocks, I realized I needed to go a different route. I wanted to keep my expenses to the bare minimum to see how cheaply I could learn this, so even buying a $10 Udemy course seemed like an investment I didn't want to make. But, after biting the bullet and taking Colt Steele's Web Developer Bootcamp, I realized this was going to be a valuable resource for me. Watching training tutorials for me was a much better way for me to ingest the information, and going through codealongs gave me the practical experience I needed to take the next steps and start coding on my own. After finishing that course, I just started tearing through coursework as quickly as I could. I keep track of how much online coursework I've taken, and I'm now up to about 570 hours, which I proudly display on my portfolio. I think being able to teach myself shows employers I have the ambition and self-discipline that is needed in this industry.

Now, with my employer sponsoring my self-education without any seeming limits, I'm going on a rampage. I was stuck on a course for the first 2 weeks I was at work, finishing up a grueling JavaScript course by Andrew Mead that just wasn't capturing my attention. But, like I said, I finished that up 2 weeks ago, and haven't looked back. Last week, I finished a 24 hour course on TypeScript by Stephen Grider, and this week I'm going to finish up another 15 hour TypeScript by Maximilian Schwarzmueller. Being that this is a subject that is very important to my day-to-day work, it's something that's really peaking my interest. There are sections in both of these courses, though, that I know we will never use. I still pay attention and learn as much as I can from these sections, because who knows what the future holds, but they aren't worth too much of my brain space. This course by Schwarzmueller was a perfect follow-up to Grider's, going over the same topics but at a faster pace, and going just a little deeper. He has spent quite a bit of time going over classes with TypeScript, which I know is a big deal in the TypeScript world but not so much in the React world, but he's done it less so than Grider did. Up next, when I finish this course tomorrow, I will be starting an advanced CSS and Sass course which I've had my eye on for some time. CSS is not my strong suit, but we don't use any kind of component libraries at work, and I need to make it my strong suit as fast as I can. I suspect I will do something similar to how I treated Typescript: take this course and then follow it up with a course by Schwarzmueller on CSS which I've already picked out. I suspect I will be much stronger in this area after this stint.

Until tomorrow!