My Time with the Flatiron School Program
Published: 2021-04-28 00:05:36

Full Stack Web Development.  At the beginning of my program in September, I had no idea what that term meant when I was first learning how to code.  It wasn't even until I had started learning Rails that I understood the code we were learning was for the backend of web development.  These last 8 months have been a crazy journey for me.  It started with the idea for a career change.  I was furloughed in April last year as a result of the pandemic in what I believe to be a stroke of good fortune.  I really wasn't happy with my job; it wasn't very fulfilling and if it was any indicator of what it would be like working in the environmental sector of the working world, then I didn't really have any interest in staying.  Because of this, I saw it as an opportunity to learn something new and give myself more skillsets to become more versatile so that I have more opportunities.

Coding had always interested me, but I didn't know where to start or what code I wanted to learn.  The Flatiron School gave me the opportunity to not only learn how to code, but also to show me what it can do and how it affects the way we use technology every day.  Originally, the program I enrolled in was intended to be a 6 month program.  Unfortunately, I hit some hurdles on my journey towards becoming a web developer and it set me back a bit.  But I had come so far, I was so close to finishing the program that I could not give up on myself, especially after learning so much.  I couldn't let myself give up knowing that I had another chance and my teacher had more faith in me than I had in myself.  So I didn't give in;  I managed to pull through, finishing my JavaScript lessons and moving on to complete my lessons in React/Redux, easily the 2 most difficult units in the program (for me at least).

I managed to complete my learning of coding that many people spend 4 or more years learning in a very short amount of time.  For me, it didn't feel that short (the pandemic didn't help with my sense of time).  I spent many days and nights learning and coding.  Some weeks passed like it was nothing while some felt like they took forever to pass.  In the end, it was some of the most difficult work I've had to do.  Having all this information thrown at you so quickly, especially when learning what is essentially a new language, is very difficult to absorb.  Sometimes it didn't quite sink in and other times I felt like I understood it right away.  The curriculum was structured so that concepts from later units built off of previous concepts.  While understanding the connections of these concepts sometimes made sense, the incorporation of entirely new concepts (like props and state in React) threw me off and slowed me down in the learning process.  But the struggle, and overcoming that struggle to reach a new understanding is part of that learning process.

Not only am I incredibly proud of the amount of coding I have learned and what I have created within the last 8 months, I am also looking forward to continuing my work in a professional work environment where the work I do has a real impact on how people interact with technology.