Second day..

Of teaching. What?! It's been a while since I've updated this blog (which is basically how it always is), and a lot has happened since my last post at the beginning of phase 3. Basically, I made it through phase 3 (mostly) intact. I did Wallbook for my small group hacakthon, with Christian Soler, and it was challenging yet fun to build something like that from scratch in only four days. After that, our entire troop moved on to working on Staffing Online for about a week and a half. Christian and I were the team leads, and Abraham Thomas was our project manager, which was awesome because he actually has a PMP certification. After that, we all split up to do our individual hackathons. I worked on and implemented all of the requirements into my portfolio, which was fun and gave my project a purpose (besides furthering my knowledge, of course). So now I have a snazzy looking portfolio, a website and database hosted using Microsoft Azure, and it feels great. Now I can actually show my family what I've been working on while I've been off their grid for the past 9 weeks.

After I presented my portfolio to everyone at camp, I had a conversation with David. I had been talking to him on and off about the possibility of working for Coder Camps over the previous few weeks. Now, my plan coming here was to move away to my dream city (Denver, Colorado) as soon as I graduated. Over the course of talking with Dave, I decided I'd be willing to move plenty of places, as long as they weren't in the south. But, I realized how great of an opportunity I have here in Pearland, working with these awesome people and helping improving people's lives. So, when Dave offered me a job to teach here in Pearland, I gladly accepted. Yesterday was my first day, and it was a little nerve wracking, but it feels great to give back to this company that has given me so much opportunity, and I'm helping give that same opportunity to the students now. It's a very rewarding experience. On top of that, teaching this material requires a much more solid understanding of it than being able to do it does, so when I come out of here I'll be the best developer I can be, which is awesome.

Anyway, it's day two of me teaching now and I already feel more relaxed about it. I can confidently answer nearly every question thrown my way off the top of my head, and, if not, a quick Google search gives me the information I need. Right now I'm just teaching fundamentals, but I can already tell the students from this troop are good about asking questions when they're confused and even asking questions well above our current scope of learning on day two, which is great. That's it for now - see you in another month or two!

Beginning Phase 3

This Friday marks the end of the first week of phase 3, and there has been a small lull in the activity level over the last 2 days. Last Friday my troop split into 3 groups of 2-3 people each, and spent most of their free time through Tuesday in a hackathon, each making a project that was different but covered the basic requirements. All of us were mentally exhausted on Wednesday morning, when we presented our projects to everyone at camp. It was an amazing experience, however. Now I can look back and see what myself and one other person can accomplish, given only 4 days. My fellow troop members also created awesome applications, and it's amazing to see how far we all have come in just 6 weeks.

Since our presentations on Wednesday we've been learning about agile software development and familiarizing ourselves with the new group project's code. All of the members of my troop are in the same group this time, which I'm excited about. I love working with everyone in my troop, since we all get along so well and help each other any time we get stuck on a problem for too long. We've been learning from Nick, who's the instructor for the third phase. He's had around 15 years of experience as a programmer, so being able to learn from someone who has been in the field that we're trying to go into is a great opportunity. 

I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks, which will include working on the group project with my team, then an individual hackathon after about a week after that, then it's over. I know it will be here before I know it, especially since I've been here for 7 weeks now and it feels like it's been a week, while somehow also feeling like a year. I'm learning so much here, and it's been so challenging, that I couldn't imagine where I would be today if I decided not to come to Coder Camps.

Beginning Of Week 3

Well, I haven't been updating this nearly as much as I was planning on, but really I've just been so busy programming I haven't even had the time. Almost every minute of my time that wasn't spent eating or sleeping over the past 2 weeks was spent up at Coder Camps, programming away. Today we were supposed to start learning angular, but Alex, our teacher, is sick today so we're watching videos he's recorded along with videos and exercises on Code School. So far it looks really cool and useful, can't wait to see its full potential.

Just to talk a little bit about camp in general: It's awesome. All of the staff up here are amazing people and are all very kind. As a camper you get 24/7 access to the building, and I've been taking complete advantage of that. A few other people in my troop, and a few from each of the troops ahead of me as well. One of my favorite things about camp is the environment. Not only do all of the staff seem like this is really where they want to be and are happy to be doing what they're doing, all of the campers are all dedicated to the program. No one's really slacking off because we all want this and paid a pretty penny to be where we are, not to mention the sacrifices the people with families had to make. It's great to be surrounded by such a great group of people, it makes it really easy to just come to camp when classes aren't going on and work on the latest project.

Speaking of projects, the first big one was a quiz app. The stretch goals on it nearly drove me insane, but I got there in the end and I'm really glad that I pushed myself to do it, because now I have a better understanding of basically everything I was working with. The most recent project was an app we all had different names for, I called mine "Chirpster." The focus of it was AJAX calls to your own firebase, and your friend's firebases, and having a live feed of Chirps. It was slightly difficult to to because even on Sunday at 5 PM less than half the people had even set up their profile or tweeted anything or had any friends added, so it was difficult to know when my program was failing to pull the data or if they formatted it incorrectly, or if it simply wasn't there at all.

Hopefully Alex will be back tomorrow, because I don't absorb the information as well when watching the guy on Code School talk, but I've only watched about three of the videos so far. I've heard that this weekend there's a big project, and then next week we start learning C#, which I've never touched or even looked at before, so hopefully I don't struggle to much with it. Until next time..

One More Week!

There's only one more week. For the past month I've been saying how much I want to be in Houston, and looking back it seems to have gone by really fast. I've done all of my prerequisites, taken the entrance exam and only missed one point because of a silly error I made, and now all there is left to do is wait and review.

I'm sitting here, at my computer, getting ready to go to sleep, it's storming outside, I have a bad sunburn from knee boarding and tubing on The Red River all day yesterday, and all I can think about is how ready I am to get started at camp. That said, it's going to be bittersweet. I'm not sure what the plans of my fellow troop members are, but for me, I'm planning on either staying in Houston or moving elsewhere. Either way, the plan is to not come back home. My parents, who I currently live with, just bought a boat three days ago, and spending all day on the boat with my immediate family made me realize how much I'm going to miss them.


This is definitely the right decision for me, however. I've put a lot of thought into all of my plans for the future, and this is what I want - wholeheartedly. As I said, I am incredibly eager to get started on this journey. I can't wait!

T Minus 40 Days

It's 40 days until I start my journey to become an amazing developer, and it's all thanks to the folks at codercamps.com **now under different ownership than the time of this writing**! This is my first ever blog, and it will be challenging for me to update it continually, but that's exactly why I chose to go to this camp. I want to be challenged, I want to be in the middle of camp and wonder why I thought this was a good idea, and I want to come out of the other side completely transformed from a novice to an expert.

Until now, every programming class I've taken in high school and college have been entry level classes to several different, but similar, languages. They were all so easy I wanted to tear my hair out. I know coder camps will be the antithesis of that, and I can't wait to get started!

For now I'll be familiarizing myself with the tools we'll be using at camp, as well as going through HTML, CSS, and Javascript basics and learning anything I can to prepare myself for the road ahead.