A little about me

If you would've told me that I would be going through a coding bootcamp 5 years ago, I would've told you that you were insane. My background has always been art and education. I first went to a community college where i took my intro drawing and painting classes and then moved on over to a big boy university. I was going to school while at the same time maintaining a part time job as an educator at different pre-schools. I never really gave it much thought into the future. As a matter a fact, I didn't have a plan as to what i was going to do after university. Fast forward four years later and here I am writing a blog about my first day of coding bootcamp.

How I got here

After living in Japan for two years I finally returned to my hometown, Los Angeles. It was nice being back with my family and friends, but this all happened during a pandemic. Finding a job was extremely difficult - especially in my field of education - but i was determined to do something with my career. I gave myself a year to figure stuff, but this only made things worse. I got into a depression and by the time I was better, a year and a half had gone by. I settled for a low pay factory job near home and I quickly realized it wasn't for me. During this time I had done a lot of thinking and narrowed my choice to coding. I had always been good with computers but never gave it a chance to take the next step. After having done my research, I decided to join a coding bootcamp. I went through all the videos on youtube and looked at all the pros and cons. At the end of the day, I realized that i function better in a classroom settings with a roadmap to an end goal.

In class experience

Coding bootcamp started before the first day of class. They gave us a chunk of pre-work assignments of html, css, java, and git. It covered the pure basics of each program, but not in depth to know what to do with it. We started class with a small powerpoint of different resources such as tutors, guides, and career services. After that, we went straight into class where we focused on Git. I quickly learned that Git and Github are two different things. Git is where we do all the edits, commits, and it also works locally. Github is a resource where we can upload all our work and work together on a project if we wanted to. I was having trouble with the meaning of staged. When things are staged they are essentially in your local root folder. If you commit, you save it. And if you push, you upload it to github. Although class was three hours long, it went by pretty fast. Tomorrow will be my second day of class. I hope to learn more and understand what i am doing.