I’m really far behind with my blogging. A lot has happened. On the personal side, things are not going well. The bootcamp has really taken its toll on family-related things. Its affected my outlook on life. Lambda is a double-edged sword. It offers a fantastic opportunity, and I’m grateful for it, but the other side is that its a significant commitment to go through it and keep up. The skills and network that students build are wonderful, but, for me at least, work/life balance is absolutely destroyed. I’m getting close to the end of it though. I’m in the computer science section, so front-end and back-end are behind me, and I really do have the ability to build websites and even simple CRUD applications now, both front-end and back-end. I need to reference my notes, and they’re probably not optimized or especially secure yet, but that will come with more learning.

On a more positive front, I’m learning Python, tackling code challenges – something which really unnerved me in the past – and have been going through freeCodeCamp‘s material as a way to clear my head a little from the harder topics at Lambda for the past few weeks. Last night, I completed fCC’s Responsive Web Design course and earned my first certificate! I’m deciding between JavaScript and Python next. I’ll probably end up going with Python, because its more in-line with what we’re using right now at Lambda, so my hope is that it’ll couple well and reinforce what I’m currently tackling.

Going headfirst into Python taught me something. So many of the tech-people I follow online have said to learn programming concepts, and not necessarily to focus on the syntax of a language. Concepts carry over and languages are just tools to implement a solution. Diving into Python has shown me that I do actually have the ability to learn other languages, maybe even rapidly as far as basics go. Knowing a bit of JavaScript has given me a reference point to compare with Python. I can see how loops or branching statements work in one, as compared to the other. I can see what data structures are supported, and how traversing them differs. It does help with confidence and with combating impostor syndrome, which is rampant in tech.

Lambda went through some big structural changes recently. My cohort felt a brunt of the changes. We didn’t have team leads or section leads anymore. We’re all mentors to people behind us in the program (I like my mentee a lot, he’s a former social worker and my working with clinicians helps me to understand him – I gave him a project idea that I’m hoping he works on). Now, we do have some team leads who are available to offer support hours again, but the first few weeks were rough. Our instructor, Glenna Yu, went through the changes with us and has weathered them really well. She’s fantastic. She’s really sharp and helps us to nail down algorithms for code challenges every time we have a lecture. She often shows us multiple approaches to a given problem. She’s one of the two best instructors I’ve had at Lambda so far.

My wife’s cousin is recently out-of-work due to COVID. He and I Zoomed for a bit last week, because he’s exploring options and programming is one of them. I went over some of what we learned at Lambda with him, and showed him free resources to start. I know that he only got to start reviewing them a few days ago and is about 60% through with the first lesson in the Responsive Web Design course at freeCodeCamp (the HTML/CSS one). It could be fun if he takes to it. He’s a problem-solver.

I’m considering blogging recent Lambda topics and then backtracking in the future, to finish the React and Node stuff that I never got to write up. I hate going out-of-order, but there’s so much to write, and I’m really just adding to the pile by not tackling at least some of it whenever I can.

Anyway. I hope all of you are doing well and are learning and advancing and building things. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before I’m able to regularly write again.