New Kid on the Bloc
Back in October of 2015, I made the choice to dive into the world of Web Development. With the promise of greater job opportunities, better pay, and the chance to make a living solving problems, it seemed like a great fit for my skills.
I came into the program with about 12 years of coding experience under my belt. While it sounds like a lot, to me I never quite felt like a professional. I was eager to find a program that would help me hone my skills to a professional level.
First Impressions
The things that stood out to me about Bloc among other hacker schools was that it was remote, had a flexible schedule, and one-on-one mentorship. The last one I felt was especially crucial, as the last few bumpy years took their toll on my confidence. I wanted to be sure I was working with a professional that knew the trade and could tell me where I stood against my peers.
Backend with Rails
Learning Rails was perhaps the most challenging part of the course. In an odd way, I felt my past experience with coding was in fact a hindrance, as Ruby’s loose syntax and implied parentheses and brackets made code hard to decypher. Over time I got used to it, though, and came to enjoy the ease and expediency the terse syntax afforded.
Model associations were perhaps the most frustrating skill to grasp. It is a concept that seems both simple to understand, yet hard to set up correctly without a guide, and I found myself on multiple projects scratching my head on how best to structure my associations for my database. Now that I’m done I feel a bit more confident with it, but I know I could still use more practice before I could call myself a master.
Frontend with Angular
Javascript and Angular, by contrast, were much easier. Not only was the syntax and concepts similar to what I knew from Actionscript 3.0, but Angular’s declarative paradigm seemed right at home alongside css classes and tags.
While Backend’s focus on search algorithms and organizing data was fun in its own right, really enjoyed creating the visual effects and interactions of Frontend work.
The Rough Spots
My biggest challenge going through Bloc had less to do with the material, and more to do with my life. Working a day job at a grocery store, living with a worried mother going through divorce, and wondering how we will pay all the bills certainly put a strain on my productivity. I had to learn to not only master the material, but develop coping strategies and routines to keep me on track.
While not perfect, things like Tai Chi and weekly board game nights went a long way toward getting me through the tougher times, and the support and encouragement of my mentors helped to validate that I was on the right track.
If I had a Time Machine…
While Bloc has a great curriculum, it wasn’t quite what I expected. Unlike a traditional classroom, Bloc is a constantly evolving program that is being improved and tweaked all the time. The result is that sometimes you may catch a mistake or two in the curriculum from time to time. This may not be a big deal for some people, but for someone like me who came into the program with some trepidation, it made me worry whether my money was well spent on this particular school. Having completed the program, I can assure you it certainly was.
The second unconventional thing is its approach to learning. In previous Computer Science courses I took, I was taught programming much like one would learn math - learning basic skills that built off one another until you reach advanced concepts. This is certainly done in the early assignments, but upon entering the first Foundation project, they throw you into the deep end. You are guided each step of the way, of course, but with Rails especially, you aren’t necessarily told how every single thing you implement works or what exactly it does. Coming from a “I need to know about everything” mindset can make this leg of the course seem overwhelming.
Overall Impressions
My only gripe with Bloc is that I wasn’t always sure where I stood in terms of my skills relative to other aspiring Junior Developers. My mentors assured me that I was among one of their top students, but I was hoping to see something more tangible to make me really believe it. Of course, given that I had been through some rough years and was more insecure going in, take that with a grain of salt. Overall, I am happy to be a part of the grand experiment of online Wed Development education.