Coding Bootcamp — CHECK. Now what?

Funny that I’ve just graduated an intensive software engineering program yet I’m having a hell of a time figuring out this WordPress thing :).

So I had a great experience at Flatiron School and I’m proud of all that I learned. I’m already dying to see what I can learn next! I feel good about Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, JavaScript, React and Redux now after being buried in the lot of them for the past 18 months. And I’ve enjoyed supplementing my learning at Flatiron with the free courses over at CodeAcademy so I’ll probably head back over there and start by brushing up on my C++, a language close to my heart because it was the first coding language I ever tinkered with (way back in the 90s!).

I graduated from Flatiron nearly a month ago now and it’s time to get cracking with the next step in this process, Career Services. FIS has already put me in touch with a great career counselor who’s time I greatly appreciate. I’ve met people in that field before and I can tell this guy knows his stuff so I am optimistic. Makes up for some of the failings of the school I’ve dealt with in the last few months (staffing issues, reduced student support, etc — a topic for a future post).

So here’s my dilemma — I have a pretty awesome job to begin with, it pays well, I can work remotely, I have an incredible boss, the subject matter is interesting and it pays well (did I say that twice?) I’m a Standards Development Manager at a scientific non-profit and the role suits me. But when you boil down what I do, regardless of titles, raises, responsibilities, in the end my job is to support the work of experts and there’s a part of me that really wants to actually BE an expert, not just support them. You could say I’m an expert in our company’s processes and I think my bosses would agree with that. But that’s just part of it — what I’ve loved about coding is the act of CREATING things. I absolutely LOVE my apps that I built for my school portfolio, but I don’t want them to be the beginning and the end of my coding career. I want to build more, and I want to work on a team where we could build something truly amazing. Therefore I am moving forward with FIS career services to see what’s out there. I certainly won’t take the first thing that comes up, I’m older than most of the other bootcampers that I’ve met and I’ve got some valuable experience to add to any organization beyond coding. So it will be an interesting search! And in fact, that search is exactly why I’m typing this post right now — apparently, blogging is an important part of creating a personal ‘brand’ identity so here goes. I suppose I’ll import all my Flatiron blogs over here at some point too (we had to write at least one for each project).

That will be all for now. I’ve got bits and pieces of web presence scattered around (a domain and a homepage at GoDaddy, this WordPress site and of course the slew of recommended social accounts) and I’ll start bringing that all together soon. Stay tuned for next steps in my journey!

Originally published at http://christopherjdent.wordpress.com on January 21, 2021.