Week one, day two of my coding bootcamp. I won't refer to it by name because I'll probably end up coming across as a plant... If you're interested enough it won't take much digging to find where I'm attending!

It's been an intense couple of days. I'm coming out of a career in yacht interior design, and the contrast here is stark. Seven years of managing projects in which ultimately I had no control over the crafting of the actual pieces - traded for four months of learning to make, by hand, pieces of work in a different format.

I like control. I like being accountable for my own work. It has been years since I've been intellectually challenged in the way that I think this course is going to do and I can't wait.
I was a nerd in school; my favourite things were Maths and Latin. I hid in the library during PE and managed to go my whole school career without a single cross country run. I left sixth form to study Physics and then decided after a year of it that I wanted to break out of that "nerd" box. I switched course, moved, and ended up taking an unrelated arts degree.

Ten years (ish...) on, and I was chugging along in the design world. But something was missing. I applied to two bootcamps, figuring that their in house assessment process (necessary to maintain their professed 99% post-course hire rate) would give me a good indication of whether I'd be able to complete. I got in to both and chose my favourite. This was in June 2020 - peak lockdown. I had plenty of time on my hands whilst work was slow so I started some Codecademy courses (Javascript, PHP, Bash, HTML & CSS). I worked on them every damn day for the three months between getting in to the bootcamp and starting - driven partly by curiosity and partly by fear. Two days in and I am so grateful that I did. The gulf between the people who prepped for this and those who didn't is already apparent, and all we've done is basic HTML & CSS styling.

Next week we apply this to build a skeleton portfolio website; the idea being we fill it with all the projects we make between now and Christmas. I'm excited like a small child.