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| codeacademy.com |
About a year ago, one of my colleagues told me about a intensive coding school that he was going to attend. He had a great idea for a startup and wanted to build the prototype.
I remember thinking to myself, is that even possible? How can you learn enough coding to be competent in such a short time? Sounds crazy, I thought. But a seed had been planted.
About that time I was introduced to codeacademy.com. I wanted to leverage my python learnings at work and I was offered a project. The slight obstacle was the application was to be written in javascript, a language I did't know. It was recommended to use codeacademy.com to come up to speed on javascript and I gave it try.
The online training experience was so different from the traditional learning model. No sitting in a lecture and then going off and trying to implement what you learned. You code and you code right away.
First you are presented a completed project. Run the code, look at how it works. Then the program is deconstructed and rebuilt concept by concept until the project is recreated. You build the application step by step. With each step you are practicing how to code and learning a concept at the same time.
I was never left a lesson feeling confused and uneasy. If I needed help I could post a question to the forum or look up information in the glossary. I could also scroll back to previous lessons to review. I was enjoying learning programming again. It was fun.
The work project never got off the ground but it was worth it to learn about online resources like codeacademy.com. I would rely heavily on codeacademy.com later.
Fast forward 9 months and I read this blog post by Michelle Glauser on resources for learning to code. She posted a fantastic spreadsheet listing quite a few coding bootcamps. I'll talk about the admissions process in the next post.
