RECAP

During the months since the last post, I must regretfully say that I did not go on to finish the Software Development MicroMasters program from edx. I attribute this to not having either an incentive and/or strong enough motivation. I truly believe I would have completed it if I had either a very strong incentive , or some sort of accountability to keep coming back, whether it be a partner, or a mentor keeping tabs on my progress.

Therefore, I was very happy to stumble upon Microverse from a medium post by its creator Ariel Camus, and one of its students, Kyle Lemon. Microverse is a remote oriented software development ‘bootcamp’ in the sense that it includes all of the fundamentals:

- HTML/CSS
- Javascript
- React
- NodeJS
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- Algorithms/Data Structures
- Job Preparation
- Mock Interviews

However, the entire curriculum is remote!

This might not seem that much different from other online bootcamps, but what is of note to me is that being paired with a partner to complete the program addresses the incentive and accountability I mentioned earlier. Being assigned a partner and a who is just as committed as you are and has the same base skills and maybe some advanced skills in other areas allows a sort of collaborative and interactive environment to sharpen and refine one’s own skills, and learn new ones from your partner. Additionally, a mentor is provided, presumably one who just went through the curriculum to provide input, direction, advise, etc as you progress through the program, with a good concentration on code reviews on the many projects you and your partner will complete.

MICROVERSE STUDENT

In order to get into the Fast Track course, I had to display my algorithm skills in Javascript. I portioned out 4 hrs in the evening to record myself doing the four questions on HackerRank. I wasn’t able to solve the last question in the specified time, and was thusly not accepted into the program. This was in sometime near the end of May. I was invited to try again, which I did later in July and was able to solve four new questions in a timely fashion. Being paired with another student was an ordeal in of itself. My partner, whom shall remain anonymous, and I were given two hackerrank challenges to complete together, with one being the driver and the other the navigator, then switching at the next question. After that, we were given the task of creating an HTML/CSS site from a zeplin.io design and hosting it on github pages, which you can find here:

Site: nuemba-ebooks

Code: nuemba-ebooks

I thought we collaborated pretty well altogether, although during the site creation portion I did 100% of the work as he felt he wasn’t up to par to my skills. This was flattering, but I should have viewed it as a red flag, especially considering that HTML/CSS is weaved throughout the entire course for each section.

SETBACK

My partner quit on me suddenly out of the blue. He stated that he very much enjoyed solving algorithms with me, but he disliked the supposed pixel pefect approach the HTML/CSS projects were taking, thinking it was very frustrating. This was very disappointing for me as I had fully committed to the 22 week program. This was enough time to complete the program before the Winter session starts for University. I had hoped in that time span I would have started applying to jobs and hopefully begun interviewing or being close to securing a job. Now I fear that it will bleed into the January and February of 2019. Ideally, I don’t want to have to go back to school to get a Computer Science degree, especially if I can start a career in software development without such a huge amount of debt and in less time, but my father has other ideas for me, considering my life seems to be going with no direction, prospects, or structure currently. School can solve all three of those, but at what cost?

NEW PARTNER?

I have been paired with another student, but we have yet to do our collaboration project, which will be tomorrow, Tuesday, Aug 21, 2018. I have looked him up on LinkedIn and he seems to have considerable knowledge in programming, going through a bootcamp, a computer science degree, etc. Hopefully, we prove to be suitable partners as I cannot suffer another setback or have to wait to be paired with another partner as my time to complete the program is limited. I would love a partner who is more advanced than me, inspiring me to catch up, act as a mentor, teacher, a great pair programmer.

NEXT

It seems that I don’t keep my promises in these blog posts, notably the promised tutorials, video or otherwise. However, as I have been doing the Microverse program, I have been live streaming using google hangouts and I suppose that’s the route I will take for the following tutorials, most likely on setting up gulp.js and creating a rest api using api.js, joi for validation, and jwt for authentication.

Most importantly , however, I want to document (almost) everyday in the program. These posts will most likely include the algorithms we solved that day and the step by step process we took to solve it.