Ironhack Day 0 - Putting Faces to Names

And so it begins - after waiting for almost six months, anticipation, and yes, in the last week or so - stress (almost), Day 1 of my Web Development Bootcamp experience is drawing closer. On November 29th I will sit in the "remote campus" (aka my home in front of my screens) and will receive my first ever face-to-face (Screen-to-screen?) lesson on web development.

So far in my learning-how-to-code-career it went from reading books to reading other books to reading StackOverflow to Google to Udemy (a bit) to CS50 (for 20 minutes) to listening to podcasts to video tutorials (mostly by Wes Bos) - to here.

For the last two weeks or so, "here" has been a state of weird alertness and a feeling of needing to cram as much knowledge in my face as I possibly could. I wanted to be prepared for the bootcamp and know as much as possible - I checked with the curriculum to see what will be the plan over the next few weeks. My reaction was mixed - halfway between "oh, awesome, I already know how to do that, that'll be great practice!" and "oh, man, Bootstrap? I don't know how to do that - why wouldn't they use Grid? Bootstrap?!" followed by multiple Google sessions trying to learn how fast you can get to know Bootstrap or Sass or - y'know.

But then, that stopped for some reason. I arrived at the thought that the bootcamp is actually the place to TEACH me that kind of stuff. So for once in my life I actually sat down and stopped worrying. Sure, I checked out things like SASS and Stylus, just to get to know the process of a CSS preprocessor for sure, and I sat down and actually learned how to properly set up ESLint. And then I sat down and started working on TypeScript, because why not? I was prepared for the first day of bootcamp, I had done all of my Career Hack prep and the prework for the first module - now it was time to do some stuff other than cram.

I recently had finished Wes Bos' JavaScript 30 (more on that in another post), and while it was a lot of fun and a great learning experience - I was pretty bummed when it was over. Mainly because now I was sitting there thinking "and what should I build now?". Wes'  message in the las video was to build a thousand projects to get great at JavaScript, and now we had done the first 30 - only 970 to go. So what I did was to keep my eyes open for ideas - and then I built two things! And it was - time consuming and just incredibly fun. Frustrating, sure, but I learned a great deal and it was just time well spent.

And the last thing I wanted to get done before the bootcamp starts was to get this blog up and running. I had some posts prepared because I didn't want it to look empty and sad. I think I did okay, and I'm pretty content with what is happening. And of course I am super stoked for the 29th.

jmc