I’ve been encouraged to start blogging for quite some time, and just haven’t gotten around to it until now. So I’ll start by explaining how I’ve gotten to this point…
A little over a year ago, I found myself somewhat complacent with my situation at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I had an awesome job with Real Salt Lake. I was about 2 years out of college with a degree in sports management and on track to have a comfortable career in the professional sports industry, what more could I ask for?
One night, while searching through the endless glory that is Netflix, I came across a movie called The Startup Kids. It’s a great documentary about several young entrepreneurs who are the founders of companies like Vimeo, SoundCloud, and DropBox to name a few. They each started their respective companies with only the knowledge of coding and an idea. That to me, was incredibly powerful. After hearing about how much fun, frustrating, and how challenging coding or building something from scratch is, I was intrigued.
That was when it really began for me. I almost immediately started researching different languages, frameworks, etc and was blown away by how much there was to learn and how many different opinions there were about where I should start. I did as many tutorials as I could get my hands on starting with html/css and eventually moving on to Michael Hartl’s Rails tutorial. Which by the way, I could not recommend more to anyone who is looking to get started with programming.By the time I finished the tutorial and had a fully functioning (basic) twitter replica, I realized that becoming a developer and programming was something I really wanted to pursue as a career.
In the time that I completed the tutorial, I had changed companies to a great startup called Friendemic, where I essentially got to work with a group of my best friends everyday day. Again, it was a great situation to be in however, I still wanted more. That was when I came across Bitmaker Labs. I had been researching bootcamps in the states for quite some time, but to leave no stone unturned I googled, “web development bootcamps Toronto”. Lo and behold, Bitmaker Labs was the first to pop up. I applied, soon after interviewed, and soon after that was accepted to the June cohort. It took me about a week to make my decision. It was a scary decision for me to make. I was deciding whether or not I wanted to up-root my entire life and make a drastic career change. But, after working through only a few tutorials, I already knew that this was something that I was truly passionate about. So I decided to pull the trigger.
About four months later I had sold everything I owned, crammed what I had left in my Jeep, and made the approximately 2000 mile (~3200 km for my metric friends) trip to Toronto. I’m now in week 5 at Bitmaker Labs and I couldn’t be happier with my decision to drop everything and make the move to become a developer.
More to come with my experience at Bitmaker Labs so far…