Wassup nerds!

I’m currently studying web design, product design, UX design, visual design, who knows? Some sort of design. It’s all vague and mysterious right now. Everything kind of blends together and it’s fascinating.

So a little background:

About a year ago I did a ton of research and self-examination to find out what my next step should be. I made list after list of what I want/need, took multiple personality tests, consulted the trolls at Reddit, and had a lot of embarrassing moments alone in the woods. After all that I somehow landed on becoming a web developer.

I originally started out on the self-taught path using various resources like freeCodeCamp, The Odin Project, Udemy, etc. got comfortable using the very basics of the main front-end languages. Although I had some success I would always hit a wall at some point and wouldn’t code for a month or more at a time. Eventually I would regain confidence and start from scratch again. This has happened like 4 times now.

I came to the realization that I couldn’t do this alone so I started investigating all the bootcamps out there. I was always a little skeptical of them because I would always find conflicting information in my research. Then I came across this video. It was hilarious and also confirmed my suspicions. Who is this dude?

Enter Perpetual Education.

After watching that video I decided to look into their program, Design for the Web. I got the impression that it was completely different from the other bootcamps out there. I wouldn’t even lump it in with the other bootcamps. The layout of the course isn’t overwhelming at all. Just one lesson for 3 hours a day so you can solely focus and retain what you learned as opposed to the other bootcamps that just bombard you with 10 hours of dry (extremely dry) information a day. The course takes 6 months as opposed to the standard 3 months. Much more practical. What’s really cool is that you can start the program without a clear vision of what exact role you want and discover what speaks to you in the process.

Long story short, I started the program 4 days ago and it has been really interesting so far.

So far:

Perpetual Education is a true “zero to hero” program. Before you even start coding you do a bunch of self-examination. Through doing this you find out a lot about yourself, how you interact with things, how you see things and how your memory works. There were definitely moments where I was like “why are we doing this?” but then you see how this is all relative to programming.

Where I struggled the most were the lessons where we had imagine what it would be like to discover something like a computer or a toothbrush for the first time and guess how we’d interact with it. Thought it would be easy but it was surprisingly harder than I expected.

In the 3rd lesson we write about what ideas we have for design, programming, apps, etc. Derek (PE Principal) expressed interest in helping me with one of my ideas which is awesome. We’ll see how it goes. Been going at it solo for a year now so it’ll be awesome to at least get some feedback and collaborate with other people who are sort of in the same boat.

I started the program a little later than everyone else so I’m playing catch up right now. I’ve been doing 2 - 3 lessons a day when it’s meant to be 1 lesson a day. I’ll be really stoked once I finally get up to speed with the rest of the class. Hopefully in time for the collaborative parts.

FYI: If you have any interest in Perpetual Education and want a student’s perspective, this is your resource. I’ll be posting on a weekly basis.

Wish me luck.