bitmaker labs: filling in the gap
I told myself to take time and write about Bitmaker Labs earlier than the end of the 7th week. Ideally I wanted to write about it at the end of every week rather than once near the end of the program. But it got busy and I forgot, so it’s happening now instead. C'est la vie.
I want to focus on before I started at Bitmaker. If you’re thinking about joining the program but you’re on the fence, I suggest looking up a few of the other students that have posted regularly about their experience. Some of them are from Bitmaker but almost everything I read before the first day was from guys and girls taking a similar course somewhere else in North America. By and large, they said essentially the same thing; that the bootcamp coding experience works for some people and doesn’t work for others. I made the decision to take a course like this when I started to see the huge gap between learning code by myself and being proficient enough for a career in it.
In 2012 I sort of fell into an opportunity to put my (up to that point) near-useless degree to work at the University of Toronto where I was offered a part-time contract job at the IT Help Desk. For a busboy at a tiny downtown pub, this seemed like a good opportunity to do something different. Besides, I knew a little about computers and grew up breaking and fixing my parents’ old machines so I figured I wouldn’t be terrible at it.
The job had me doing a lot of password resets, troubleshooting printing issues, that kind of thing. It wasn’t necessarily hard work, and it beat the living hell out of serving food so I learned as much as I could and tried to focus on getting better at my job for the few hours I did it each week. On top of that, the people I worked with were great. Very patient, understanding and willing to let me take time out of the work day to learn a bit of code.
Soon enough I was offered an extension to my contract and a different title: “Web Content Administrator”. Not much changed, really, but I got a little raise and an extension for another 8 months. I was still taking a lot of Help tickets and jamming my hand up the back of printer now and again too. However, it wasn’t too long before I found myself in more meetings than I had ever been in before, being asked questions about content and how things were written and communicated.
I found myself wanting the site to look good. I would walk to work and think about improvements, ways to smooth out the experience, how to make something look a little better and I noticed myself applying some of the same layout and design skills I had used with print media to my job at the University only this time I was using code to make it happen and I had suddenly found something I just loved.
I think it was about that time that I started looking into coding bootcamps, both in the Bay Area and Chicago; they were expensive but feasible and I didn’t know at the time that there was one in my own backyard. What I did know is that a four year CS degree plus a semester or two more to boost my high school grades to simply qualify was a little too much to give up. I’d be finishing school at 29 or 30 and taking on way more debt in the long run, in the end it just wasn’t an option for me.
This past January I found myself with a sort of unique situation on my hands. My contract at the University had ended just before Christmas and I knew that I had enough experience to want to continue coding but not really focused enough on any one area to be desirable in the tech job market. The coding schools in the United States looked great but were a little too expensive for me right then. I change my search on google from “code bootcamp san francisco” to “code bootcamp toronto”, hit enter, click the link for Bitmaker and within about 7 business days of that search I was accepted to the March 2014 cohort and working hard on our prework course.