Not Your Typical Code School Review: My Journey To Becoming a Developer Part I

The Early Days

I'd been interested in programming for a very long time, well, I guess curious is the appropriate word. I took the introductory course in high school where I learned a bit about HTML, CSS and Visual Basic (which was in style back in 2005). The following year I couldn't sign-up for the follow-up course (Java) because of AP's, and that was the last time I did anything related to programming in a long time. 

I went to college and studied finance because I had no idea what to study (I was focused on playing soccer), and it was what most people were doing. I figured I'd always have an out to a good paying job if I studied finance and playing sports professionally did not work out as expected. I took some computer classes, but nothing programming related. I enjoyed computers and math, but again, I was more curious than actually interested. This was between 2008-2010, but nothing came of it.

Once again, in the year 2012, I was playing soccer in Paraguay so I had a lot of spare time, and started thinking about programming once again. I studied a bit but quickly lost interest because even though there are many resources online, they are not that well structured, and it's hard to go from the very basic ones, to intermediate.

Back In Miami

I moved back to Miami at the end of 2012 after some frustrations with soccer, and enrolled at FIU at night to study math, with the idea of completing a Master's Degree in Computational Finance / Mathematical Finance / Financial Engineering, whatever you wanna call it, basically, applied math for finance. I started learning C++ and really enjoyed programming, more than my math classes. Between math courses (the most important aspect for admission into a top program), soccer and work I didn't have as much time for programming as I would've liked, so I kind of put it on hold. I resumed in March of 2014, learning Python on my own, but only a couple of times a week (if that!) and progress was very slow. 

I invited two programmer friends to dinner to see what I could do to speed up my learning, as I realized I really enjoyed programming and wanted to make the career change, I was not too enthusiastic about going to school full-time for another two years, going 100k plus in debt, and then having to move to New York to work for a Wall Street bank (full disclaimer: I was working for a big Wall Street bank, but here in Miami, and had turned down a move to NY). That's when my friends, Igor Guerrero and Sebastian Henao, told me about Wyncode, a dev bootcamp.

Wyncode

At the end of 2014 I presented my resignation to my boss at Morgan Stanley and made plans to enroll full-time at Wyncode. Wyncode is a bootcamp that lasts 9-weeks. It is full-time and you pretty  much dedicate all of your time to it. It costs $10,000 so it is a huge commitment, not only because of the cost, but because you are not going to be working for three months also. I knew it was a big risk that I was taking, but I have always worked very hard for achieving my goals and knew it was the right choice.

I started the course in January of this year, and I met with the owner on the first week to discuss what my expectations were. I told Jo that I would get a job to start right away after Wyncode and that I'd also win Pitch Day (there's a final project at Wyncode at the end of the course that I will get into later). Thinking back, she probably thought I was some cocky guy who was in over his head, but to me it meant a compromise, and it'd motivate me to really work hard.

The first week was fairly simple, I had seen most of the concepts so it really flew by. We were given a project to create a game over the weekend, and took it slightly, thinking 'Hey, this is easy, I'll kill it!' I tried to do something with some graphics (I had built some games with Python and Pygame), but unfortunately Ruby (the language taught at Wyncode) doesn't really have a good library for that. I ended up making tic-tac-toe or something, and thought I'd win when we presented on Monday (guess I was actually some cocky guy who was in over his head). 

Boy, was I surprised when I get to class on Monday, and this guy, Spencer, who I work with now, has created a role-playing game using the command-line. I was blown away and realized I didn't know as much as I thought I did, first humility lesson of many to come. The second week went well, and I thought I could do this whole thing easily. I got up at 7am every morning to code, then I would go to class from 10am-6pm, and then I had soccer every day so I'd get the chance to start coding again at 10pm. I'd code for 1-2 hours, to get up the next day and do it all over again. 

The first month went by easily, I ran into some problems, but with the help of the amazing TA's, plus friends outside of the program, I was doing great. (Gotta take a moment to name them all because they really helped me a lot and I am forever grateful, wouldn't be here without them: Igor, Sebastian, Dainel Vera, Auston Bunsen, Walter Latimer, Frank Ortiz, Ed Toro) There was one problem at Wyncode though, I felt people respected me because I was doing well (in my opinion, up there with Spencer and Tasio, each with different strengths and weaknesses), but did not feel particularly liked. I didn't know how to change this, I tried to make jokes when I got to class, and say 'YOOO!!!' really loudly when I got there, but wasn't working. I wasn't particularly fond of Mario A. (two Marios in my class), and he wasn't fond of me. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on, but I was about to find out. 

Falling Back To Earth

After the fourth or fifth week, we started learning the Rails framework, and this was the first time where I truly felt lost. All the concepts were new, there were many things happening behind the scenes that I did not understand (lack of knowledge is one of the things that frustrates me the most), and did not like being told that I did not need to worry about it. Personally, I was struggling but did not want to admit it, after all, I was supposed to be one of the good ones in class. To make matters worse, we were assigned a trio-project and I was working with two other developers for the first time. I thought that being part of a team meant I'd do my part, come back two days later and turn it in. As long as I was doing my part, that meant I was a good teammate. I went to Mardi Gras for the weekend, and I came back to a lot of feedback, of the negative type.

Turns out doing your job does not make you a good teammate, it makes you a reliable one at best, and at worst, it makes you an egotistical asshole who does not care about others and does not know how to work well in teams. The feedback I got from the trio project was all negative, there was nothing to salvage from it. Honestly, it really hurt and my first reaction was to make up excuses on my mind. I could only nod, and walk away, I had just been slapped right across the face.

This is getting super long for a blog post (my original idea was writing a review of Wyncode) so I'll break it down into two parts right here. 

Next up: the last few weeks of Wyncode, Pitch Day, job interviews, and next steps.

Hit up the comments section if there's anything you'd like to ask or say!