Completed Week 1 of Hack Reactor

Hello all, welcome to my first journal post! I am currently attending the Hack Reactor Software Engineering Immersive and as the title states, I have just completed my first week. I will update my journal as I go through stages of the immersive.

A little bit about myself: I was a veterinary technician for 4 years and managed my family's business for 3 years. I began my coding journey at the beginning of this year. I don't have formal education in Computer Science but was curious about web development and began to teach myself HTML,CSS, and JavaScript. I did that for about month before deciding I wanted to join the software engineering field.

Completing Basic Prep and Precourse Before the Immersive

I researched various bootcamp programs before deciding on Hack Reactor. Hack Reactor has a free prep course that is optional but I found essential to enroll in. The prep course itself is very well structured and did a great job explaining the fundamentals and making myself feel comfortable with Javascript syntax. In addition, it truly begins to shape your thought process on how you approach a coding challenge. Although the prep course is repetitive at times, it was helpful to get more comfortable with typing out code and ensure I was understanding what each method accomplished.

After completing the prep course, I felt prepared for the Technical Admissions Assessment and after having passing the TAA, I was automatically enrolled in the Precourse. At this point, there were specific deadlines that I needed to meet in order to attend my desired start date for the immersive. The Precourse ramps up in the reading material you will need to learn as well as the difficultly of the problems you are tasked with. I completed the precourse in a month while still working full time and it gave me a better understanding of what to expect once the actual program begins.

A few days before starting the immersive, you are given the daily schedule for the entire program. The program is 6 days a week with a mix of lectures, pair programming, coding challenges, and breaks throughout the day.

Day 1 was very eventful but also a blur. There are many lectures throughout the day explaining what Hack Reactor expects of every student and how the students should utilize the applications we are required to use in order to communicate with staff members. We also meet students that are beginning the second part of the immersive as well as the rest of our cohort mates and begin pair programming.

The majority of the first part of the immersive is focused on pair programming. It requires each student to be paired up with a fellow cohort mate and work together to accomplish the presented problem. At this point, I have been paired up with 2 different students and it was been an interesting and productive experience. Thus far, I had only been solving coding problems on my own and it was a good experience to explore a new concept with another student. It is a good opportunity to recognize one's strengths and weaknesses and be able to combine what each student's understanding of the material is in order to advance in the sprint. As a software developer, you will be working with other developers on a single project so it is a great experience to work one on one with a cohort mate and explore the new concepts together.

When reading about other's experiences with bootcamps, it was a mixed bag of how instructors were at various institutions. I was unsure of how lectures would be taught, how engaging they would be, and how helpful staff members would be. I was thoroughly surprised to have engaging lecturers who have a positive vibe and want to make sure everyone is participating and understanding the concepts being taught. Thus far, the lecturers have been patient and will stick around afterwards for any additional questions.

There are also other staff members who are available throughout the day and students are able to contact them through a resource called Helpdesk. Helpdesk is for any technical questions and is truly great when feeling completely stumped on a current sprint. The staff members do not directly tell you the answer but guide you in a way that allows you to think of the solution yourself. As a software developer, you have to be able to learn how new technologies work with the resources found online through dedicated documentation. As well as, be able to debug the errors you come across in your projects on your own.

First of all, I'm tired. But despite that I am even more excited for the weeks to come. I did not expect the overall atmosphere to be so positive and encouraging. It seems Hack Reactor understands just how difficult and draining this program can be but it is setup in a way that the students are pumped up throughout the day and really encourages students to bond with one another.

Each day moves quickly so it is important to be organized and I have been jotting down concepts I need to revisit or coding problem solutions I want to optimize.

I will continue to update my journal throughout the course and reflect on each part as well as write about various coding problems encountered.

Stay tuned and happy coding!