One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite parodies of all time goes like this…
“This is a story of love and loss, fathers and sons and the foresight to retain international merchandising rights. This is the story of Star Wars. Let’s begin with part four.” –Peter Griffin
The love of this line not only stems from the very apropos merchandising reference, but more the deadpan delivery of the line “Let’s begin with part four.” My life to this point can be very conveniently divided into my major educational experiences and the times that followed. I will eventually write about high school, my first degree in Visual Communication Design and my second degree in Web Application Development, but for now I’ll focus on my latest adventure, my tenure at General Assembly’s Full Stack Web Development Immersive Program and what lead up to it.
About a year ago, I was laid off from a startup job in which I was hired as a Junior Developer, employee 13, that I held for 10 years. More on this in Part III. After being unemployed for over 8 months and working with a government Workforce Center, I knew I needed a different approach. While I had made sure to keep my team’s skillset current, mine remained stagnant. Just too much time spent on emails and in meetings. By this point, I knew I wanted back in the trenches.
My company’s product was never responsive. I had done responsive-style home pages, but never had quite grasped mobile-first design. I tried online courses and they helped tremendously, but just didn’t give me back that love I had once felt for design. However, I did become enamored with the technical side of modern design implementation. I had done a tremendous amount of JavaScript and jQuery at my previous position primarily to overcome our application’s shortcomings, but never using industry standards or best practices.
When the possibility for paid training became available, I jumped on it. I spent weeks researching and investigating my options, finally choosing General Assembly. From their admissions team to the curriculum, and, most importantly at the time, job placement rate, it was not a difficult decision. Even with all the legwork I had done, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The prework was pretty extensive, almost 50 hours, even with my experience. On that first day, I was amazed that almost the entire class of 13 had no previous experience whatsoever. I thought to myself, “How are these people ever going to make it?”. I would soon find out.
Over the next 12 weeks, I saw these cooks, bartenders, and salespeople, some of them just kids, blossom into amazing web developers. Through the curriculum and the tutelage of one of the most amazing teachers I have ever had, all of us were developing full-stack web applications using cutting-edge technologies I had only read about. These included, but were not limited to: HTML5, CSS/Sass, JavaScript, React, jQuery, Bootstrap, EJS, Node, npm, Express, Python, Django, Mongo, Mongoose, and PostgreSQL. Those were just the technologies used in actual projects, not to mention the countless others we were exposed to and tinkered with during lessons and homework.
That number of technologies isn’t surprising considering the immersive program included over 400 hours of instruction and more than 200 hours of self-driven project time. This was the most grueling experience I have ever gone through and I have worked 12 hour days for weeks at a time. As a group we laughed, we shed tears, we even rocked a party bus, but above all, we didn’t just get an education, we shared an experience. An experience that I will not only hold close to my heart for as long as I live, but I know will be instrumental in part IV of my life.