I’m completely new to coding. I started from scratch in January using online learning tools. I got hooked by watching videos on HTML and CSS on Treehouse. After that, I moved on to learning JavaScript, jQuery and Bootstrap on Free Code Camp.
I decided I wanted to speed up my learning by joining a development bootcamp. After heavily researching all the alternatives, and reading other students’ blogs, I decided to interview at Makers Academy in mid June.
A few days later, I received an email from Maker’s coach Nikesh with awesome news: I had passed! He also suggested some options to get prepared for the course:
- Improving my typing skills with TypeRacer and TypingClub.
- Reading GitHub’s guides.
- Reading Chris Pine’s Learn to Program book.
- Doing some katas on CodeWars every day.
- Doing Ruby koans.
I also found completing the command line, Git and GitHub courses on Codecademy very useful as an ice-breaker.
Fast forward to September. Week 1 of the pre-course at Makers Academy is done. Time passed really quickly but I have enjoyed every single day. On the morning of August 29th we received a kick-off email from Ana, our pre-course coach, giving us access to the online materials, and providing some guidance and valuable advice. Also, all the students in our cohort were invited to a channel on Slack.
We organised a meetup at Google Campus on Wednesday. It was a great idea to share our first impressions and get to know each other better.
On the first week we covered the following learning goals:
- Set up our development environment.
- Get familiar with the command line, Git and GitHub.
- Complete a mystery challenge using the command line.
I feel like I have much more confidence on all those topics than just seven days ago!
What will week 2 bring us?