November 27, 2017 I opened up the email newsletter from Women Who Code. I love this newsletter the information and resources that I have gotten from it are invaluable to me. This newsletter had a coupon code for $600 off FullStack’s Bootcamp Prep in a Week Workshop. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t discuss it with my husband I signed up. (Best decision ever). Before getting accepted into the workshop we had to pass a quiz. We were given access to a course called Javascript Jumpstart to help with the quiz. I took the course and sweated through the quiz. I passed the quiz which was 3 javascript challenges. And then I got an email saying that I was accepted into the bootcamp prep class. PHEW!!!!
A few days later I was reading an email from Laurence Bradford who runs learntocodewith.me who has an awesome podcast called Learn To Code With Me. This email had information about the Winter is Coding Scholarship process that FullStack was running where you get entries for completing different tasks. (Isn’t that convenient). I started going through the tasks. I watched the video, I twitted about it, I posted it on Facebook everything except for the last task which was to apply to FullStack. I had wanted to apply to their bootcamp for over a year now but I was intimidated by the application process. I had read other people’s post about the coding challenge and the skype interview. I was honestly scared to apply.
I kept doing what I had been doing for months with my self guided process. I did FreeCodeCamp, CodeSchool, Udemy, Udacity and many others. There is also an online version of a bootcamp prep course online that is self paced I was working on this a week before the start of the actual workshop. I still didn’t feel ready. So the day of the Bootcamp Prep Workshop came. This was going to be a week long workshop to help get ready for the interview. Saturday morning 7:00 am California time I log on and I meet my classmates and my instructor and we got right to work.
The way it worked was that the instructor taught us about a certain topic and then he split us off into groups and we did pair programming. It was a lot of fun but what I realized after a few hours that I had a really good grasp of the work and I could get through most of the challenges rather quickly and I was able to talk my classmates on how to get all the tests to run on the challenges. I felt great, I felt empowered. I actually felt ready to apply to FullStack, so I did.
I will write about that process next…
Claudia Maciel 