I’m currently about a third of the way through the Bloc curriculum, so now seems like a good idea to ponder the road travelled so far.
I’ve had a long-term, on-off relationship with coding. I’ve been enamoured with the idea since the age of seven, when I received the birthday gift of one of these:
and a subscription to this:
Many a wet Sunday afternoon was spent typing out the free programs included in the magazine, trawling lines of code for typos, and saving it all onto a cassette (eeeekbebeepgrrr…any computer enthusiast from the Eighties will always remember the screechy sound of a program loading from tape). As a child, the idea of something doing exactly what you tell it was very beguiling…even when it took a lot of effort.
After some experimentation with HTML around the turn of the millennium (my scanned in analogue photos on an Angelfire website to share with my friends - if only I’d invented instagram…), and a Masters’ degree in Computer Science in my early twenties, and several jobs where I’ve been able to dabble but never to code all day, I made the decision that it was now or never.
A boot camp seemed like the perfect way to build on my existing knowledge, to modernise my skill set, to make the move to web focused technologies and build a portfolio. This way of learning seems to be becoming more and more popular and in London alone there is a wide range of courses on offer. Some of the classroom based ones looked very appealing but often seem to have a strong focus on the social aspect and spending evenings bonding. This sounds like a lot of fun, but someone has to put my kids to bed so unfortunately that approach wasn’t for me.
I ultimately chose Bloc as it provides a well rounded curriculum and the opportunity to work under your own steam, and the most valuable resource - an expert mentor who you can contact for help when you’ve been thinking yourself into a tangle for hours and Stack Exchange has failed you. Its so nice to know that you can contact someone and just say ‘But why???’, and get some help in working out what’s wrong (clue: its probably some missing parentheses…)
When I first had formal lessons in coding, I learnt C++. I also have some experience with php, Java and HTML, and have been spending time this year learning web development basics from freecodecamp, so aspects of this first third of the curriculum have come quite easily - I could happily do Codewars problems all day, and no problems with the basics of HTML. This has however thrown into sharp relief all the parts that are brand new. CSS is a mystery that I’m very slowly unravelling. Angular is a terrible tease - one minute I think I understand, the next I realise I haven’t a clue.
I intend to devote my next posts to the very basics of these ‘brand-new’ things, in the hope that writing them down will aid my understanding.