Foggy Night at Pearland Town Center

Week 2 Progress & Looking Ahead

Goalizr.com - Making Goals Happen

Classes continue to explore the tools and techniques used by professional web developers to build dependable and robust applications. Every night we work on homework assignments that can take up to 3 hours to complete. In the morning we review the previous night's assignment, and then move right into new material for the rest of the day.

Our class works really well together, finding solutions to problems and sharing resources to help build our skills. And, as always, the instructors and other troops are more than willing to offer help when needed. Thanks everyone! I feel like all the collaboration will give us a leg-up in our careers as web developers.

Every day has been a challenge, but also rewarding. I'm starting to get really excited about bringing all this together and start working on our class and personal projects. I've got a couple of ideas for a personal project. One is an online/mobile goal tracker app with novel features that utilize the lastest research in goal achievement. It has to be something I can get up and running (think Alpha) in the last three weeks of camp, so I'll post more information when we get closer.

Saturday Afternoon Study Session

Going through tutorials today. This morning we built a website that would be used by a school to add and edit student information within a database. Next up: An app to present movie listings with the ability to create, read, update and delete the movie records (That's CRUD for short, by the way.)

Classes, Methods & Functions Oh My!

Day 3 & 4 were crazy. Tons of material is being covered and I've never had to push myself this hard to learn something new. From extension methods to polymorphism, we've been up to our necks in code. Building our first "app" was rewarding, though. It's not completely functional, but my partner and I managed to get it fleshed out pretty good. It's a simple checklist app that will eventually let you add items to the checklist and send the list to an email address. Yesterday, we had visitors from Tsevo, a Houston based software development company, give us a presentation on some of their projects as well as answer questions about starting a career as a junior developer. Very informative, and they showed us some pretty cool examples of what's possible with the skills we're learning.

Day One - Meet "The Stack"

ASP.NET MVC Stack

Day One of Coder Camps was a whirlwind introduction into the language, tools and projects we'll be working on. Our group will be developing the admin dashboard & tools for an up-and-coming crowdfunding site called Fund.io.

I'd write more, but I'm busy finishing up my assignment: Write three functions in C#, one that will calculate the area of a circle (given the radius), one that calculates the circumference of a circle (given the radius), and one that will return the reverse of a string (ex. "What?" into "?tahW").

Edited 11:04pm - Finally finished the assignment: http://ideone.com/Fe7k8p

Get Out The Map

After thinking about making a shift in my career path for some time, I've decided to pull the trigger. At the end of the month I'm heading out west to Houston for a nine week intensive (10-12 hrs/day, 6-7 days/wk) bootcamp to acquire the skills needed to become a software developer.

A few weeks ago I heard of this new format for learning computer programming through a friend of the family. This young lady attended a three month bootcamp in 2012 to learn Ruby on Rails. She said it was intense, but that it really paid off. She worked hard, and was hired by one of her instructors, who owns a software development company in Nashville. She now has a rewarding career in a field that's in high demand right now, and in the foreseeable future.

Inspired by her story, I began to do some research, along with some heavy-duty soul searching, and came up with a plan to attend one of these bootcamps and work to become a software programmer in the web development field.

I found a bootcamp located in Houston, Texas called Coder Camps that teaches the ASP.NET (pronounced A-S-P dot Net) framework. After speaking with some programmers in the Nashville area, and conducting my own research*, I found that ASP.NET would be a strong choice since many of the large healthcare, insurance, hospitality and entertainment companies in Nashville are using ASP.NET to develop their software systems.

Out of the many "coding" bootcamps that have sprung up in the country's tech centers over the last few years, Coder Camps is the only one offering an immersion study program focusing on the ASP.NET framework. In 9 weeks you learn the critical skills needed to work as a junior programmer. For an extensive list of these kinds of bootcamps, check out BootCamper.io.

After submitting my application to Coder Camps, I was invited to a Skype interview with David Graham, the founder of Coder Camps and the owner of a software development company based in Houston. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with David about his school, the curriculum, and the requirements for attending. After speaking with him for about half an hour about my background and my goals, he approved my application. It's a big commitment, and that's the main reason for the application/interview process. They want to be 100% sure that students know what they're getting into and the sacrifices they'll have to make. But in the end, I believe the reward of an exciting new career in web development will be worth it. So, here's to new beginnings, and maybe a little Texas-style BBQ!

*Research Sources
Google Trends - Software Technologies
BuiltWith - Framework Usage Statistics
Indeed - Job Trends & Job Salaries