Today is Tuesday, July 7, 2020. On Wednesday, I graduate from General Assembly, an Immersive Software Engineering Fellowship. It’s been quite a journey from TV editor with zero knowledge of coding to full-fledged Software Engineer with a background in a variety of programming languages.
There were nights when I definitely thought I was going crazy, when I wanted to give up because the material was so hard to understand. Three months, seven days a week, hundreds of hours… it was a constant struggle to hold onto this crazy train.
Now, I approach the end — a place without instructors, without peers who can help — to continue this journey alone. Finally, I’ll go off the rails.
In order to graduate from the bootcamp, we were asked to learn a new language or technical stack that we hadn’t learned during our time in the course as part of our final project. Because I had heard it mentioned so often in conjunction with coding, and thanks to its somewhat cutesy name, I chose to learn Ruby on Rails.
Sure, there were many hot new languages out there, more relevant and more suitable to finding a job. But what I took away from this exercise was the proof that I could learn a new language — or anything, really — without hours upon hours of instruction and daily drills. I can be self-reliant.
As a future Software Engineer, who will likely work for a number of companies with various frameworks, that’s an extremely important skill to have. It was a hard lesson to learn… a lesson I had to teach myself.