The Decision

The decision to go into programming, without any prior programming knowledge was an easy one. I had lost my passion for medical school, and I really didn’t want to pursue a Masters or a PhD in Biochemistry. As a result, a career change was really my only option unless I wanted to stay in a job that didn’t seem to have a lot of growth potential. You can read more about my decision behind my career change from my first ever post on this blog: Catching Up and the Move to Development. But why coding? Well, the previous job I held gave me ample opportunities to speak to other Engineers about programming. After months and months of discussion, I was intrigued and finally decided to give coding a shot and and taught myself Ruby with Codecademy.

After Codecademy, I found that I really, really enjoyed coding, in fact I was falling in love with coding and the idea of being able to build whatever I set my mind to was intriguing. However, Codecademy wasn’t enough, and I found that I wanted a more immersive experience, and that’s where coding bootcamps came in.

Coding Bootcamps

The question then became, “Which bootcamp, or rather which bootcamps?” I wrote an in-depth blog posts on my thought process with selecting a bootcamp, which you can find here: Selecting a Bootcamp. But to briefly summarize the process, App Academy was my top choice based on my former roommate’s success with the program, as well as their tuition model, which was fairly unique in the Bay Area. Additionally, following the advice of Haseeb in his blog post, Cracking the Coding Bootcamp – The Definitive Guide, I also applied to back-up bootcamps.

My top two bootcamps were App Academy and Hack Reactor; if I hadn’t been accepted to App Academy, I would have applied to Hack Reactor. Those two had the most dominant presence and slew of positive reviews out of all the other bootcamps, hence why they were my top two. Since I started learning Ruby first, I decided that all my back-up bootcamp options would be in Ruby, and thus I applied to bootcamps such as Coding Dojo, Dev Bootcamp and General Assembly. I got accepted into all three, but decided that I would attend Dev Bootcamp if I couldn’t get accepted into either App Academy or Hack Reactor.

Thankfully, I was accepted into App Academy and dropped applications and interviews to all the other bootcamps. You can checkout my in-depth breakdown of my App Academy application process, which may or may not have changed since I applied, in my previous posts: App Academy Application Process Part I and App Academy Application Process Part II.

Part 2!

Part 2 will come hopefully soon! There’s so much on my plate right now, I can’t wait to share it with all of you as soon as I get into the swing of things. The next part will cover my App Academy journey, as well as tips and tricks that I found incredibly helpful as I made my way through the curriculum.

Resources and Links

Disclaimer: Below are the links for the resources I used during my application and learning process. These links are affiliate links, so if you’re interested in helping me out and allowing me the time and freedom to continue to write and add value to you, please feel free to click them and make purchases if you were going to buy them anyways! Otherwise, I’ve included the title and author for each book I recommend.

Also to note, I’ll only post links and resources that are relevant to the article I’m writing. No spam, promise!  Additionally, I’m posting my App Academy referral link as well! If you end up enrolling in App Academy, you get tuition credit and I get a referral fee, which I will use to buy YOU coffee/breakfast/lunch/dinner/boba;), whichever you’d like.

Apply to App Academy! https://www.appacademy.io/referral_redirect?hash=ff2f84fde076ad18

Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper: http://amzn.to/2yyR7r3

This book came highly recommended by App Academy during the application process. I found it an amazing resource in learning the little nuances of Ruby that make it magical.

Learn to Program by Chris Pine: http://amzn.to/2xpw5Lh and the free online version: https://pine.fm/LearnToProgram

This book and website were also recommended during the application process. I found it useful since it had clear explanations for someone who’s just starting out without a technical background, like myself.