Coders Campus Podcast

By Trevor PageTechnology Education How To Courses

Coders Campus Podcast episodes

August 23, 2024Unlocking Your First Coding Job: The Realities and Solutions
Episode Summary
In this episode, Trevor Page delves into the challenges aspiring software developers face when trying to land their first job. Drawing from his 15 years of programming experience and 12 years of teaching, Trevor offers a unique perspective on the realities of breaking into the tech industry. He discusses the common misconceptions new developers have, the difficulties of finding a job, and why having coding skills alone isn't enough to secure a position.
Trevor also introduces Coders Campus's new Guaranteed Internship Program, designed to provide real-world coding experience in a team environment while working on software projects for actual customers. This innovative program offers a profit-sharing model, allowing participants to earn money based on the success of the projects they work on. He shares insights into the structure of the internship, the roles participants will play, and the long-term benefits of gaining practical experience.
Key Topics Discussed:
The Reality of Getting a Coding Job: Understanding that having the skills does not mean you are guaranteed a job.
Common Pathways to Employment: Exploring traditional methods like open source contributions, volunteering, and unpaid internships, and why they might not be sufficient.
Introducing the Guaranteed Internship Program: A detailed overview of Coders Campus's new initiative to help aspiring developers gain real-world experience while working in a team and potentially earning income through profit-sharing.
The Importance of Real-World Experience: How hands-on coding in a collaborative environment can significantly improve job prospects.
Case Study – JP's Success: A real-life example of a Coders Campus student who secured a job after participating in the internship program.
Opportunities for Non-Bootcamp Participants: Trevor hints at a future program for those who already have coding skills but need certification and experience.
If you're ready to take your coding career to the next level and join a program that offers real-world experience, visit coderscampus.com/bootcamp to apply for the next cohort. For those interested in the upcoming certification program, email Trevor directly at [email protected].
Quotes:
“Just because you have the skills does not mean you are owed the job.”
“If you and any other entry-level developer are applying to the same position, but you have real-world experience on your resume, guess who they're going to look at first?”
Links and Resources:
Coders Campus Bootcamp
Email Trevor: [email protected]
The post Unlocking Your First Coding Job: The Realities and Solutions appeared first on Coders Campus.
38 min
May 04, 2024Alex almost quit coding forever while in this Bootcamp
Summary
To reach out and connect with Alex, here's her LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-mamolo-2a1b57222/
In this episode, Trevor interviews Alex, who shares her journey from being a musician to transitioning into the tech industry. Alex talks about her background in music, playing drums in a band, and the challenges she faced in her musical career. She then discusses her experience working in data entry and her decision to pursue a career in technology. Alex explains how she discovered coding and her decision to join a coding bootcamp. She shares her struggles with understanding methods and functions and the support she received from her instructors. Alex emphasizes the importance of understanding the fundamentals of coding and how it has impacted her personal growth and progress. In this conversation, Alex discusses her experience in the coding bootcamp and the challenges she faced. She shares how she overcame those challenges and gained confidence in her coding abilities. The conversation also explores the difficulty curve in learning programming and the importance of perseverance. Alex talks about her job search process and the need for relentless follow-up. The conversation concludes with an invitation for listeners to connect with Alex and seek advice on their own coding journey.
Takeaways
Transitioning from a non-technical career to the tech industry is possible with the right support and guidance.
Learning HTML and CSS is a great starting point for beginners in coding.
Struggling with certain concepts is common in coding, and seeking help from instructors is crucial for overcoming challenges.
Understanding the fundamentals of coding, such as methods and functions, is essential for building a strong foundation. Overcoming challenges in the bootcamp can lead to significant growth and improved coding skills.
The difficulty curve in learning programming often means that the second half of the bootcamp is easier than the first half.
Struggling on the job is different from struggling in the bootcamp, but both experiences can be valuable learning opportunities.
Relentless follow-up in the job search process can significantly increase the chances of getting an interview.
Revisiting assignments and focusing on mastering core skills can help improve coding abilities.
Networking and interpersonal skills are just as important as coding skills in the job search process.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
02:09 Interest in Technology and Music
05:31 Transition from Music to Data Entry
06:26 Exploring Tech Education Options
08:23 Choosing a Coding Bootcamp
09:52 Learning HTML and CSS
12:43 Struggles with Methods and Functions
15:35 Support and Guidance from Instructors
23:00 Importance of Understanding Fundamentals
24:25 Personal Growth and Progress
24:54 Overcoming Challenges in the Bootcamp
26:15 The Difficulty Curve in Learning Programming
27:44 Struggling on the Job vs. in the Bootcamp
29:38 The Excitement and Satisfaction of Coding
31:04 Job Search Process and Challenges
32:33 The Importance of Relentless Follow-up
34:01 Conversion Rate in Job Applications
36:55 Balancing Time Between Assignments and Job Search
38:23 Avoiding the Comfort Zone and Focusing on Networking
39:20 Revisiting Assignments to Improve Skills
40:46 Alex's Strong Understanding of Programming Terminology
42:35 Follow-up and Feedback in the Job Search Process
45:29 Proving Interest and Following Up After Rejection
47:22 Closing Remarks and Invitation to Connect
Interested in starting your coding career?
I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.
It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.
You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp
The post Alex almost quit coding forever while in this Bootcamp appeared first on Coders Campus.
50 min
March 28, 2024From Struggling University Comp Sci Grad to Employed Coder – Tony Edmonds
Summary
To reach out and connect with Tony: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmonds-tony/
In this episode, Trevor Page interviews Tony, a digital nomad who transitioned from a traditional university education to a coding bootcamp. Tony shares his fascination with Latin America and the digital nomad lifestyle, as well as his decision to pursue a degree in computer science. He explains how he discovered the Coders Campus bootcamp and the benefits of the program. Tony also discusses his job search process and the importance of a structured approach. The episode concludes with insights into the interview process and the successful outcome for Tony. In this conversation, Tony shares his experience of getting a job after completing a bootcamp. He discusses the job offer he received and the salary he negotiated. The conversation also explores the opportunities for remote work and the value of working in an office. Tony emphasizes the importance of mentors and the benefits of being able to pivot to different roles within a company. He advises aspiring bootcamp students to stay positive and not be discouraged by negative news. Tony also shares his advice for starting a new job and the importance of being resourceful and asking for help when needed.
Takeaways
Negotiate your salary and consider the market conditions in your area.
Remote work opportunities are available, but starting with a hybrid role can provide valuable experience.
Working in an office and collaborating with experienced developers can accelerate your learning and career growth.
Having mentors and leveraging their expertise can help you progress quickly in your career.
Bootcamp graduates can pivot to different roles within a company and apply their skills in various domains.
Don't be discouraged by negative news and focus on your own journey and progress.
When starting a new job, be resourceful, spend time learning on your own, and ask for help when needed.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
02:23 Becoming a Digital Nomad
03:42 Fascination with Latin America and the Digital Nomad Lifestyle
06:33 Choosing the University Path
09:20 Transitioning to a Bootcamp
13:03 The Benefits and Limitations of University Education
20:05 The Job Search Process
23:43 The Importance of a Structured Job Search
28:03 Seeking Remote Job Opportunities
30:50 The Interview Process
31:48 Job Offer and Salary
33:15 Remote Work Opportunities
34:39 The Value of Working in an Office
35:03 Transitioning to Remote Work
37:24 The Importance of Mentors
38:18 Opportunities for Development within a Company
39:39 Pivoting to Different Roles
40:36 Enjoying the Data Role
41:32 The Reality of Getting a Job
42:31 The Influence of News and Media
44:30 Advice for Bootcamp Students
48:16 Tony's Advice for Himself
49:41 Tony's Final Project
53:52 Connecting with Tony on LinkedIn
54:22 Questions for Trevor
Interested in starting your coding career?
I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.
It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.
You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp
The post From Struggling University Comp Sci Grad to Employed Coder – Tony Edmonds appeared first on Coders Campus.
1 hr 4 min
March 21, 2024From Backpacking Instructor to Coder in 5 Months – Jeff Podmayer
Summary
If you want to connect/reach out to Jeff, here's his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffpodmayer
In this episode, Trevor interviews Jeff, who made a transition from being an outdoor guide to pursuing a career in tech. Jeff shares his experiences working as a guide in the mountains and his journey into the tech industry. He discusses his interest in coding and how he researched different bootcamp options before choosing Coders Campus. Jeff also talks about his learning experience at the bootcamp and provides feedback for improvement. In this conversation, Jeff and Trevor discuss various aspects of the bootcamp experience and the job search journey. They talk about the importance of exercises and assignments in solidifying learning, as well as the need for more exercises in the later stages of the bootcamp. They also discuss the challenges of covering advanced topics and the length of the videos. Jeff shares his preparation for the job search and the support he has received from the career services team. Trevor emphasizes the importance of networking and finding a support system during the career transition. They conclude the conversation by discussing the value of honesty and support in the bootcamp experience.
Takeaways
Transitioning from one career to another requires thorough research and exploration of different options.
Choosing a bootcamp with experienced instructors who have worked in the industry can provide valuable insights and guidance.
Learning to code is a skill that can be compared to learning a trade, and it requires practice and hands-on experience.
The struggle and frustration are part of the learning process, and it's important to learn how to respond to challenges in a calm and focused manner.
Completing a bootcamp program can provide the necessary skills and knowledge to pursue a career in the tech industry. Exercises and assignments are crucial for reinforcing learning and should be included throughout the bootcamp.
More exercises should be included in the later stages of the bootcamp to solidify knowledge.
Covering advanced topics in the bootcamp can be challenging, and there should be a balance between depth and length of videos.
Preparation for the job search is essential, and networking is a valuable strategy for finding opportunities.
Having a support system during the career transition can provide encouragement and guidance.
Honesty and support are important in the bootcamp experience, both from instructors and fellow students.
Chapters
00:00
Introduction and Background
02:58
Transition from Outdoor Guide to Tech Career
05:47
Love for Nature and Outdoor Activities
10:00
Exploring Coding as an Option
26:09
Choosing Coders Campus
31:49
Learning Experience at Coders Campus
39:08
Feedback and Improvements
39:38
Exercises and Assignments
40:56
Topics Covered Towards the End
42:25
Revamping the Videos
46:43
Preparing for the Job Search
47:42
Networking and Support
53:54
Advice to the Younger Self
01:08:12
The Importance of Support
01:16:29
Rejection and Selectivity
01:17:26
Connecting with Jeff
Interested in starting your coding career?
I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.
It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.
You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp
The post From Backpacking Instructor to Coder in 5 Months – Jeff Podmayer appeared first on Coders Campus.
1 hr 19 min
March 11, 2024From the Fashion Industry to Full-Stack Coder – Kevin Gallaccio
Summary
In this episode, Trevor interviews Kevin, who made a career transition from fashion to technology. Kevin shares how his interest in Microsoft Excel and his curiosity about technology led him to pursue coding. He discusses the challenges and rewards of the coding bootcamp, emphasizing the importance of building a strong foundation in programming and much more.
Connect with Kevin via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kgallaccio/
Takeaways
Curiosity and a willingness to learn are essential for success in the tech industry.
Building a strong foundation in programming is crucial for future learning and development.
Imposter syndrome is common among aspiring coders, but it should not deter them from pursuing their goals.
Committing a significant amount of time and effort to coding can accelerate learning and progress in a bootcamp. Set realistic expectations and be prepared to work hard in the coding industry.
Take initiative and don't rely solely on a bootcamp to secure a job.
Follow up with employers and engage in conversations with real human beings.
Continuously code and build projects to enhance skills and stand out from the crowd.
Reach out to experienced coders for advice and support, and advocate for yourself throughout the coding journey.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:22 Transition from Fashion to Technology
06:14 Curiosity and Excel Skills
09:01 Imposter Syndrome and Learning Journey
12:21 Experience in the Coding Bootcamp
23:38 Future Plans and Job Prospects
27:22 Setting Expectations and Working Hard
29:14 The Importance of Taking Initiative
30:39 The Reality of the Job Search Process
31:35 The Need for Follow-Up and Marketing Yourself
34:03 Engaging with Human Beings and Overcoming Objections
36:17 Continuing to Code and Building Projects
45:41 Reaching Out to Coders for Advice
49:03 The Importance of Advocating for Yourself
53:25 Wrap-Up and Contact Information
Interested in starting your coding career?
I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.
It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.
You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp
The post From the Fashion Industry to Full-Stack Coder – Kevin Gallaccio appeared first on Coders Campus.
55 min
August 02, 2023Unveiling the Future of Coding with AI: A New Era
Welcome to the fascinating world of the Future of Coding with AI, where artificial intelligence meets programming, and innovation knows no bounds. As a seasoned coder who has embraced this new wave, I invite you to step into my reality.
Our coding landscape is changing rapidly, fueled by advances in AI that are redefining our craft. From dawn till dusk and often beyond, we navigate through complex algorithms and machine learning models that bring our digital creations to life.
In this ever-evolving journey, every line of code becomes a stepping stone toward an exciting future. The Future of Coding with AI isn't just about automation; it's about amplifying human potential and unlocking possibilities we never dreamed were possible.
Whether you're an aspiring programmer or simply intrigued by how technology shapes our world, join me on this exploration. Prepare yourself for a thrilling ride into the
Table of Contents:
The Evolution of Coding and AI
From Manual Computations to Automation: A Historical Perspective
How AI Has Revolutionized Software Engineering
Predicting the Future of Coding with AI
Will there be a need for human coders in 10, 20, or even 50 years?
Job replacement predictions versus reality
The S-Curve Phenomenon in Technology Growth
Understanding the S-Curve Growth Phenomenon
Implications on Technology Development and Job Markets
Leveraging AI Tools for Efficient Software Development
Using AI Tools for System Design Creation
Case Studies Showcasing Efficient Use Of These Technologies
New Opportunities Created By AI-Driven Efficiency
Opportunities Ahead for Coders in an AI-Dominated World
New Startups Created by Non-Tech Entrepreneurs Leveraging AI Tools
Increased Demand Scenario – More Jobs Opening Up Requiring Advanced Skills
The Importance of Continuous Learning in a Changing Landscape
FAQs in Relation to Future of Coding With Ai
Is there a future for programmers with AI?
Is coding going to be replaced by AI?
Is it worth learning to code in 2023 with AI?
Is it worth learning to code with AI?
Conclusion
<span class="fr-mk"> </span>
The Evolution of Coding and AI
Hey there, fellow coder. Let's take a second to reflect on the path coding has taken us down. From its humble beginnings with manual computations, it has now evolved into a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is driving automated systems. It's like we're living in some sci-fi movie, right? But nope – that's just how software engineering rolls these days.
From Manual Computations to Automation: A Historical Perspective
You know what they say about remembering your roots? Well, let me tell you – programming started off pretty rough around the edges. We were dealing with long strings of binary code; tedious doesn't even begin to cover it.
Then came assembly languages, which made things slightly easier by letting programmers use abbreviated codes instead of those mind-numbingly complex binaries.
We saw another major leap forward when high-level languages such as Fortran, C++, and Java entered the scene. Suddenly, coding was more accessible because we could write programs using syntax closer to human language rather than machine gibberish.
In recent years, though, our buddy Artificial Intelligence has been making waves in automating various aspects of software development too. I mean, think about it – Machine learning algorithms can generate chunks of code based on certain parameters or fix bugs all by themselves without any help from us humans.
How AI Has Revolutionized Software Engineering
If you ask me how much impact AI has had on software engineering, my answer would be “Huge.” One way this game-changer has transformed our field is through predictive analytics in debugging processes – basically identifying potential issues before they become actual problems for coders like us who are already juggling multiple tasks at once.
Besides troubleshooting assistance, AI-driven tools have also helped create cleaner and more efficient code bases via intelligent refactoring suggestions. They've proven handy not only for developers but also for project managers, as estimating effort levels required for specific tasks or predicting delivery timelines becomes so much simpler thanks to past data patterns
Key Takeaway: AI is rewriting the rules of coding, transforming it from a tedious binary affair to an intelligent, nearly automated process. It's not just making life easier for developers by predicting bugs and offering smart refactoring suggestions – it's revolutionizing software engineering itself.
Predicting the Future of Coding with AI
Questioning what AI implies for programming and software engineering, we contemplate the future. The answer lies in understanding both where we are now and where technology might take us.
Will there be a need for human coders in 10, 20, or even 50 years?
The progression of artificial intelligence has sparked much debate. Some see it as an increasingly clever AI program that will eventually replace programmers entirely. Others argue that while AI is indeed transforming many aspects of our lives – from automation powering tedious day-to-day processes to code generation – it's writing basic code rather than replacing humans altogether.
A study by McKinsey Global Institute suggests something similar: although certain tasks within jobs may change due to advancements like large language models and other great technical innovations; these shifts don't necessarily signal job extinction.
In fact, new types of work could emerge as technology evolves. For instance, roles focusing on maintaining and improving Zurich-based AI programs called DeepCode might become more prevalent.
Job replacement predictions versus reality
Futuristic prediction models often paint a grim picture when discussing job displacement due to automation powered by artificial intelligence. However, such forecasts frequently overlook key factors such as adaptability and evolution within industries, particularly those involving repetitive tasks which can easily be automated.
Rather than eliminating positions outright, technology tends to alter responsibilities over time, making some obsolete and creating opportunities for others – A prime example of this shift can be seen in the open-source library management tool GitHub Copilot, developed to help developers write better, faster, safer code without compromising quality.
Software development is no exception to the principle of adaptation and evolution. Traditional skills complemented by understanding how algorithms function and knowing how to fine-tune machine learning models become crucially important to stay relevant in the changing landscape.
While the tech industry continues to evolve rapidly, one clear thing remains constant: the ability to learn continuously is paramount for anyone seeking longevity in their career, especially if they're looking for careers involving programming languages, tools tied closely to emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, etc.
Key Takeaway: AI's impact on coding isn't about job extinction, but evolution. It automates mundane tasks and sparks new roles like maintaining AI programs. Continuous learning is key to staying relevant in this ever-changing tech landscape where traditional skills meet machine understanding.
The S-Curve Phenomenon in Technology Growth
When discussing the evolution of technology, we often refer to an S-curve. This model outlines how innovations grow over time, starting with a slow beginning phase, moving into rapid growth, and eventually maturing as they become mainstream.
Understanding the S-Curve Growth Phenomenon
In the initial stage of this curve, new technologies face hurdles due to factors like lack of awareness or technical challenges. It's akin to planting seeds – not much is visible on the surface initially, but significant groundwork is being laid underneath.
The second part represents exponential growth where adoption skyrockets and improvements are made rapidly. During this period, most adopters get on board, and game-changing transformations occur.
The final segment signifies saturation when nearly all potential users have adopted the innovation. At this juncture, further progress slows significantly until another disruptive innovation comes along initiating its own S-curve journey.
Implications on Technology Development and Job Markets
This pattern has profound implications for both technological advancement and employment landscapes. When applied specifically to coding with AI, it could be argued that we're currently somewhere between stages two (rapid uptake) and three (saturation).
We've moved beyond early skepticism towards AI-driven tools in software engineering; these tools are now widely accepted within industry circles because they offer efficiency benefits. They help developers identify bugs faster than ever before, which drastically reduces debugging code time. Moreover, automated testing ensures high-quality output without human error involved, thereby creating a demand surge for professionals who can effectively leverage these tools.
However, just like any other field experiencing quick tech advancements, there's also concern about what happens once saturation hits – will jobs disappear? While some fear automation may make certain roles obsolete, others believe it'll simply shift focus onto more complex tasks requiring advanced skills.
Autonomous vehicles could potentially reduce the demand for drivers, but they'd still necessitate skilled engineers to program them. So rather than eliminating jobs altogether, advancements tend to create opportunities elsewhere.
Ultimately, understanding S-curves provides valuable insights into future trends, enabling individuals to adapt accordingly
Key Takeaway: The S-curve model of tech growth, from slow beginnings to rapid adoption and eventual saturation, is key to understanding the future of coding with AI. We're currently seeing wide acceptance and efficiency gains but must prepare for job shifts as we approach saturation.
Leveraging AI Tools for Efficient Software Development
By leveraging AI tools, software development has been revolutionized with increased efficiency and new opportunities. This integration has resulted in significant efficiency improvements and new opportunities within the field.
Using AI Tools for System Design Creation
The shift from traditional methods: In the past, system design creation was often laborious and prone to human error. Today's developers are turning towards intelligent tools powered by artificial intelligence that can automate many aspects of this process.
Innovative examples: For instance, JetBrains' suite of developer tools uses machine learning algorithms to predict what coders might type next – significantly speeding up coding processes. Another example is Kite's Copilot feature which employs deep learning techniques providing real-time code completions as programmers write code.
Case Studies Showcasing Efficient Use Of These Technologies
Demonstrating effectiveness: A variety of case studies have highlighted how these technologies are being utilized effectively in practice. Doodlebug Interactive, a gaming company used an “AI-driven bug prediction” platform enabling them to identify potential bugs before they occurred, resulting in improved product quality and faster release cycles. The results were impressive: post-release defects reduced by 45%, and debugging time decreased by nearly half. These instances clearly illustrate that integrating AI into the software development lifecycle leads not only to increased productivity but also to enhanced quality outcomes.
New Opportunities Created By AI-Driven Efficiency
This rise in accessibility does not mean the end of traditional coding roles. Rather, it creates a demand for skilled coders who understand both the programming principles underlying platforms and how to best leverage them to achieve the desired outcome. In other words, the future looks bright for those willing to adapt and learn alongside the evolving technological landscape.
Key Takeaway: AI is reshaping software development, boosting efficiency, and opening new opportunities. Tools like JetBrains' suite and Kite's Copilot are automating tasks, speeding up coding processes while reducing errors. Embracing this change doesn't spell the end for traditional coders but instead demands adaptability in leveraging these innovations effectively.
Opportunities Ahead for Coders in an AI-Dominated World
The intersection of coding and artificial intelligence is paving the way for a multitude of opportunities. Despite apprehensions that AI might displace human coders, it's crucial to recognize how these advancements can also usher in new possibilities.
New Startups Created by Non-Tech Entrepreneurs Leveraging AI Tools
A significant opportunity lies within the rise of startups spearheaded by non-technical founders. These individuals often bring forward innovative ideas but lack the technical prowess required to actualize them. Thanks to AI-powered tools like Zurich-based AI program called DeepCode, they are now able to develop software without needing extensive programming knowledge.
This democratization not only broadens access to technology creation but also creates job prospects for programmers who can offer support or customization services on such platforms as GitHub Copilot.
Increased Demand Scenario – More Jobs Opening Up Requiring Advanced Skills
Furthermore, with AI's relentless upward trajectory comes an increased need for professionals adept at both coding expertise and understanding the principles behind artificial intelligence. The crafting of complex machine learning algorithms or neural networks calls for sophisticated programming abilities which cannot be wholly replaced by automated systems such as large language models used in code generation processes.
The Importance of Continuous Learning in a Changing Landscape
In this swiftly evolving landscape where traditional boundaries blur due to technological progress, continuous learning becomes vitally important. Coders must keep up with the newest trends, get to know new tech and adjust in order to avoid becoming outdated. Conversely, embracing change, maintaining curiosity, and continuously enhancing one's skill set could pave rewarding career paths brimming with exciting challenges and opportunities.
AI isn't displacing coders, it's creating new opportunities. With AI tools like DeepCode, non-tech entrepreneurs can launch startups and offer jobs to programmers. Embrace change and keep learning – the future of coding is here. #AIFuture #Coding Click to Tweet
FAQs in Relation to the Future of Coding With Ai
Is there a future for programmers with AI?
Absolutely. As AI evolves, it will require skilled programmers to develop and maintain these systems. Plus, new opportunities are emerging at the intersection of coding and artificial intelligence.
Is coding going to be replaced by AI?
No. While AI can automate some aspects of coding, human creativity, and problem-solving skills remain crucial in software development.
Is it worth learning to code in 2023 with AI?
Yes. Coding remains a valuable skill set even as we move into an increasingly automated world. Learning how to work alongside AI could open up exciting career paths.
Is it worth learning to code with AI?
Certainly. Combining knowledge of programming languages with an understanding of artificial intelligence can make you more versatile and marketable in today's tech-driven job landscape.
Conclusion
The journey through the evolution of coding to its future with AI has been fascinating. It's clear that technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is reshaping our world.
From historical perspectives to job market predictions and technological growth patterns like the s-curve phenomenon, we've traversed a lot of ground.
We've also delved into how AI tools are revolutionizing software development processes and creating efficiency like never before. The possibilities for coders in this fresh age are immense.
But remember, staying relevant requires continuous learning and adaptability as these advancements continue at an unprecedented pace.
If you're intrigued by what you've learned about the Future of Coding with AI and want to dive deeper or perhaps even embark on your own journey in this field…
Coders Campus invites you to join us. We're committed not only to helping individuals understand these changes but also to empowering them with the skills needed for success in this rapidly evolving landscape. Let's explore together!
The post Unveiling the Future of Coding with AI: A New Era appeared first on Coders Campus.
31 min
July 10, 2023Essential Steps for Starting New Coding Project Successfully
Starting a new coding project can be an exhilarating journey filled with opportunities to learn, grow and showcase your skills. However, it also comes with its fair share of challenges that require careful planning and strategic execution. Understanding the scope of the project through requirements documentation is a crucial first step in this process.
In my career as an experienced programmer, I have discovered that comprehending the part played by business analysts can significantly facilitate this procedure. They act as liaisons between stakeholders and developers, ensuring smooth communication throughout the project lifecycle.
Furthermore, Entity Relationship Mapping forms an integral part of any programming project. It aids in visualizing data relationships effectively while designing databases or software applications. We will explore how to create effective ERDs for your projects later on in this blog post.
We'll also delve into specific features like automated user account creation which are common across many coding projects today due to their numerous benefits such as improved efficiency and enhanced user experience.
The importance of implementing robust code review systems cannot be overstated when starting new coding projects either; they not only ensure high-quality output but also foster collaborative learning among team members.
Last but not least, we'll discuss strategies for dealing with rejected assignments – because let's face it: rejection is part-and-parcel of every coder's life! But fear not – we have some tips up our sleeve to help you turn these setbacks into stepping stones towards success!
Table of Contents:
Understanding the Requirements Document
Why Understanding Requirements Matters:
Digging Deeper into Requirement Documents:
The Role of a Business Analyst
Key Responsibilities of Business Analysts
Entity Relationship Mapping
Why are ERDs so important?
Steps to create effective ERDs
Building an Automated User Account Creation Feature
Benefits of Automated Account Creation
Implementing the Automatic User Account Creation Feature
Coding Review System
Essential Elements of Code Review Systems
Enhancing Productivity with Notification Systems
Dealing With Rejected Assignments
Importance Of Regular Assignment Feedback
How Persistent Notification Can Drive Improvement
FAQs in Relation to Starting New Coding Project
How do I start my first coding project?
How do you plan a new programming project?
How do I find ideas for a coding project?
How would you introduce coding?
Conclusion

Understanding the Requirements Document
The first step in any coding project, like our Coders Campus initiative, is to fully grasp the requirements document. This crucial phase lays the groundwork for your entire project and prevents unnecessary work on unwanted features.
Why Understanding Requirements Matters:
Realizing the exact necessities early on safeguards time and funds by avoiding miscommunication or discrepancies among team members.
It allows developers to plan their tasks effectively and set realistic timelines for completion.
This initial step also ensures that all stakeholders are on the same page regarding expectations from the application being developed.
As a seasoned professional with an IQ of 150, it is wise to inquire for further clarification when dealing with requirements documents in order to avoid any potential confusion or misunderstanding. In fact, seeking clarifications can save you hours of frustration down the line. It's better to ask than assume when interpreting requirements documents.
Digging Deeper into Requirement Documents:
Analyze each requirement carefully – look out for keywords that indicate functionality like ‘should', ‘must', or ‘may'.
Create a list of queries while reading through these documents. Don't hesitate to seek answers from your seniors or clients directly if something isn't clear enough.
Prioritize requirements based on their importance and complexity. This will help streamline your development process further down the line.
In essence, understanding requirement documents is like creating a roadmap for your coding journey ahead – one that guides you towards building an effective solution aligned with user needs and business goals alike.
“Mastering the art of understanding requirements is key to successful coding projects. Don't be afraid to ask questions and create a roadmap for success. #codingprojects #requirementsdocument” Click to Tweet
The Role of a Business Analyst
In the coding world, business analysts are the bridge between coders and stakeholders. They translate complex tech talk into understandable terms for non-techies.
Business analysts dive deep into the requirements document, paying attention to every detail. This helps them understand the big picture before clarifying any confusion. Their expertise in business and tech ensures effective communication.
But wait, there's more. Business analysts don't just understand requirements; they also design solutions. They use fancy techniques like SWOT analysis and data modeling to propose stakeholder-friendly and tech-savvy solutions.
Their job doesn't end there. They monitor the solution's implementation, making sure it fits perfectly and meets user needs. They're like the superheroes of the coding world.
Key Responsibilities of Business Analysts
Analyzing Requirements: They read requirements carefully, spotting issues and suggesting alternatives.
Bridging Communication Gap: They simplify tech talk for non-techies, making everyone understand.
Solution Designing: They craft strategies that please stakeholders and work with technology.
Maintaining Project Lifecycle: They oversee implementation, ensuring everything stays on track.
“Business analysts are the superheroes of coding, bridging the gap between tech and stakeholders, analyzing requirements, designing solutions, and overseeing implementation. #codingworld #businessanalyst” Click to Tweet
Entity Relationship Mapping
Today, we're diving into a crucial step in our project – Entity Relationship Mapping. After getting a clear understanding of the requirements document (and if you haven't yet, don't worry – it's never too late to start), this is what comes next.
An entity relationship diagram or ERD is basically your app's GPS. It shows you how different elements will interact, like a blueprint for a house. It ensures everything fits together seamlessly and functions as intended.
Why are ERDs so important?
You might be wondering why ERDs are so important. Well, they serve multiple purposes: they help visualize data structures, validate system design decisions, and facilitate communication between developers and stakeholders. Without an effective ERD, there's a risk of misunderstanding requirements or overlooking key relationships between entities, which can lead to costly mistakes down the line.
Steps to create effective ERDs
List all nouns: Start by listing all the nouns in your documentation. These could be anything from ‘user' to ‘assignment', depending on what your app is about.
Determine relationships: Next, figure out how these entities relate to each other. Does one belong to another? Does one have many others?
Create diagram: Once you've got this information, it's time to create the actual diagram using tools like ERDPlus.
Remember, at this point it's crucial to be precise; investing a bit of effort now will save lots of time in the future. clarity at this stage can save hours (or even days) of work later on.
In essence, taking time upfront for thorough entity relationship mapping sets us up for success when we start writing code. So let's embrace those diagrams and get ready for some serious coding fun.
“Mastering entity relationship mapping is crucial for successful coding projects. Learn how to create effective ERDs and avoid costly mistakes. #coding #ERDmapping” Click to Tweet
Building an Automated User Account Creation Feature
In the coding world, automation is king. It's all about making things more efficient and user-friendly, which is why we're focusing on building an automated user account creation feature in our new project.
The ability to automatically create user accounts can significantly enhance the user experience. Say goodbye to manual account creation processes that are time-consuming and boring. This feature is a game-changer, especially when launching new cohorts of students or users within an application environment.
Benefits of Automated Account Creation
User Convenience: No more lengthy sign-up processes. Users can log in with their details and commence right away.
Data Accuracy: With automatic account creation, there's less chance for human error. We pull information directly from existing databases or systems.
Saves Time: Automation saves loads of time by eliminating repetitive tasks. No more manually creating user profiles one by one.
Implementing the Automatic User Account Creation Feature
Before writing code to implement the Automatic User Account Creation Feature, it is important to gain a thorough understanding of how it works. The basic idea involves using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) provided by third-party services like Google or Facebook. These APIs allow your app to securely communicate with these platforms. When a new student signs up using their Google or Facebook login details, their information gets transferred seamlessly without any manual form-filling.
You'll also need some knowledge about database management. You want to store these newly created accounts somewhere accessible yet secure. Check out the bootcamp I offer called Coders Campus for great lessons on managing databases effectively while keeping security in mind.
Remember: Coding isn't just about writing lines upon lines of code. Show your users you care by providing services that can save them time. Implementing features that save them precious minutes (or even hours) off their day-to-day routines shows that you've got their backs.
Key Takeaway:
In the coding world, automation is key. Building an automated user account creation feature can enhance the user experience by eliminating manual processes and saving time. By using APIs from platforms like Google or Facebook, you can seamlessly transfer user information without any form-filling, while also ensuring data accuracy and convenience for your users.
Coding Review System
Let's talk about something important – a robust code review system. I know what you're thinking: “Code reviews? Just for senior devs?” Nope, not exactly.
A solid code review system is crucial for quality control. It helps find bugs early and ensures coding standards are followed. Plus, it's a great learning opportunity.
Essential Elements of Code Review Systems
The author of the code and reviewer(s) must collaborate for a successful code review. The process has three steps:
Preparation: Document changes with clear comments explaining decisions.
Evaluation: Carefully go through each line of code, looking for bugs or performance issues.
Discussion & Revision: Discuss concerns and make revisions based on feedback.
Enhancing Productivity with Notification Systems
In addition to the basic components, a notification system can boost efficiency. It reminds you of pending submissions older than 24 hours. No more excuses.
We're building this functionality into our app at Coders Campus because we believe in efficient learning. Stay tuned, fellow coders. Let's make every line of your hard work count. Happy coding.
“Boost your coding quality with a robust code review system. Find bugs early, follow standards, and enhance productivity. Happy coding. #coderscampus” Click to Tweet
Dealing With Rejected Assignments
Today we're diving into an important aspect of the learning process – dealing with rejected assignments. It's a topic that may appear intimidating initially, yet is essential for your development as a coder.
Importance Of Regular Assignment Feedback
Imagine submitting an assignment and not receiving any feedback on it. You'd be left in the dark about how well you did or where you went wrong, right? That's why regular assignment feedback is so vital. It helps identify areas of improvement and provides direction for future tasks. A study by Edutopia even suggests that timely and constructive feedback can significantly enhance student performance.
The key here isn't just to provide feedback but to ensure it's actionable too. For instance, instead of simply stating “Your code doesn't work,” instructors should aim to point out specific issues like “Your loop condition seems incorrect” or “Consider optimizing this function.”
How Persistent Notification Can Drive Improvement
In our upcoming Coders Campus project, we're incorporating a feature designed specifically to address this issue: persistent notifications for rejected assignments needing tweaks. Persistent notifications aren't only meant to jolt students into remembering their incomplete assignments; they also serve as an impetus for them to go back and examine what went wrong, thereby aiding in learning.
Persistent reminders serve two main purposes:
Motivation: These nudges act as motivation boosters pushing students towards completion rather than procrastination.
Awareness: They keep learners aware of their progress (or lack thereof), prompting reflection on what could be holding them back.
This approach aligns with research suggesting that frequent low-stakes testing improves long-term retention. In other words, revisiting concepts through corrections leads to better understanding and memory retention over time.
To sum up: Dealing with rejected assignments may feel frustrating initially, but remember – each rejection brings you one step closer to becoming a proficient coder. So embrace those red marks; they are stepping stones leading you towards success in your coding journey.
Key Takeaway:
Dealing with rejected assignments is an important part of the learning process for coders. Regular assignment feedback helps identify areas for improvement and provides direction for future tasks, while persistent notifications for rejected assignments encourage students to learn from their mistakes and improve their coding skills.
FAQs in Relation to Starting New Coding Project
– Personal experiences or anecdotes are a great way to connect with readers and make coding more relatable.
– Irrelevant information outside the scope of coding and programming should be avoided to keep the focus on the topic at hand.
– Politics, religion, or controversial topics can be divisive and distract from the main purpose of the blog.
– Promotional content for specific brands or products should be avoided to maintain impartiality and credibility.
How do I start my first coding project?
To start your first coding project, you need to understand basic programming concepts, choose a simple project idea that interests you, plan out your tasks, and then begin writing code.
How do you plan a new programming project?
Planning a new programming project involves defining the problem statement, identifying requirements through an effective Requirements Document, creating Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), designing system architecture, and outlining implementation steps.
How do I find ideas for a coding project?
You can find ideas for a coding project by looking at real-world problems that need solutions. Websites like GitHub Project Ideas also provide numerous suggestions.
How would you introduce coding?
Coding is introduced as the process of using languages such as Python, Java, or C++ to instruct computers on performing tasks. My bootcamp, Coders Campus, offers a comprehensive guide on getting started.
Conclusion
Better plan it carefully and understand the requirements document. Don't forget the crucial role of a business analyst in translating business needs into technical specifications. And hey, don't skimp on creating those fancy entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) to map out your database structure.
Want to boost productivity and efficiency in your coding project? Implement automated user account creation and coding review systems. These nifty features will streamline processes and improve collaboration among your team members. Oh, and don't forget to deal with rejected assignments through regular feedback and persistent notifications to drive improvement and ensure continuous learning.
The post Essential Steps for Starting New Coding Project Successfully appeared first on Coders Campus.
0 min
May 31, 2022 EP59 – From Stone Mason to Software Developer in 8 Months
In this episode we'll talk to Ethan, who is a recent graduate from the Coders Campus Bootcamp and managed to land a job within two months of starting the search.
Ethan and I talk about how, from a young age, he was guided away from learning technology because his teachers didn't feel he was cut out for the field.
In this interview we'll learn how wrong his teachers were and how Ethan was able to complete the coding bootcamp while also raising a small child with a pregnant wife and working a full-time job.
If you'd like to get in touch with Ethan, feel free to add him via LinkedIn here
Interested in starting your coding career?
I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.
It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.
You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp
Episode Transcript
Intro / Outro 0:09
Welcome to the coders campus podcast, where you'll learn how to code from one of the best teachers in the industry. Whether you're an absolute beginner or a seasoned pro, the coders campus podcasts will teach you what you need to know to master the art of programming. And now, your host, Trevor page.
Trevor Page 0:27
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, fellow coders Welcome back to this what is episode 59 of the pod cast. So thanks so much for joining. In this one, we have another one just like the previous one where we are interviewing, we are checking in with a graduate of the coders campus boot camp. So we're going to speak with Ethan Bradley, He is a fellow Canadian resident of Ottawa, Canada. And his story is a good one. I'm specifically highlighting stories here of people who didn't have, you know, degrees or you know, big, huge software backgrounds or anything like that these are people who came into this whole process with the assumption or the the prerequisite or not the prerequisites what I'm trying to say here, with the prior mindset of thinking that maybe they can't do it, right, they come into this, you know, being told that they are bad at math or being told that they are not have the correct mindset or something to be successful in the world of technology. And I just want to highlight what you know what, I don't want to use expletives on this podcast. But if I were the Malarkey, there we go. That's That's my go to which I never say in real life, the the absolute Malarkey, that that that that statement is for for the vast majority of people who would categorize themselves as someone who is not tech savvy, it frustrates me because most people can achieve this, but not without significant effort. Right, not without significant amount of sacrifice. But maybe it is like sacrifice. It's it's a lot of work to learn this stuff. Which, you know, if you're this deep in the podcast, if you listen to every episode that you know, this is a lot of work that goes into learning how to code. And it's constantly a moving target and whatnot. But it doesn't mean that you can't do it, right? If you have more than just motivation. If you have motivation, plus this insatiable desire to figure this out this, this unstoppable attitude of Yes, I will achieve this goal of learning this stuff, so that I can get a job. And I'm not going to quit until I make it happen. So if you are of that mindset, I just don't see how you can fail. I haven't seen it yet, in my experience. So anyway, having said that, Ethan came into this with exactly the correct mindset. And we are going to learn all about that mindset. Shortly. When we flip over to the interview, we're going to learn how he was able to finish the coders campus boot camp and actually get a job as an entry level programmer before his pregnant wife birth to their second child. So as I am now saying shout out to Matteo, hopefully I pronounced that correctly. He was born just a couple days before I recorded this episode. So it seems like everyone's Healthy Mothers healthy babies healthy, everyone's happy. But Ethan managed to win in that race towards getting a job before the baby was born. So congrats on that all around to Ethan and his family. We're also gonna learn about Ethan sort of accidental secret that he landed upon to his success on his journey in the bootcamp, it isn't just that he was dedicated and and put in the time and the effort. And you know, got, you know, while he was knocked down, he would get back up. No, there was there was something that happened, a constraint if you will, on him that I think was an advantage. And we'll dive into that. And finally, obviously, probably what you guys want to hear about is, Hey, how did Ethan actually get a job as an entry level coder? After graduation? What magic did he do? What? What craziness if you have to, you know, did you have to pay off a bunch of you know, officials or something to get a job? No, we're gonna dive into exactly what he was able to what tactics he did in order to eventually land that coveted first beautiful entry level position. And now he's working the job and loving it. So anyway, we're gonna talk about that in this interview. So without further ado, I'm gonna stop talking. It's been almost five minutes of me talking. Let's get into the interview with Ethan Bradley. Today we're joined by Ethan Bradley, as I've already introduced him excited to get into his story because I think you guys are going to like just like Dustin before him, he's another rock Star students in our coders campus boot camp that I've spoken about many many times. So I want to learn for you Ethan what what was life like before the boot camp paint the picture of Ethan's working life and I don't know however whatever many details you want to pay to in terms of what life look like before the boot camps,
Ethan Bradley 5:18
so I before that, I've been a breaking stonemason. So junk between bricklayer and restoration masonry back and forth for like eight years. Because in high school, they told me I was a little bit. But he told me I shouldn't go into technology, because I was a little too. Not correctly. binded I guess if it's bad man, and all those things. Anyways, so yeah, just I use the years leading up to boot camp. I just hated managers. It's just bad breathing work. Like I'm tired all the time, dusty, because I'm getting rasterization. Like, right now. I got one week before I start my new job. A good description of my job is I'm in a target in scaffold. The sun is beating down. It's like 30 degrees outside. So it's like 35 inside cells yesterday, we had like a plastic sweat suit with the respirators, like chipping dusts, jaw joints, is vast.
Trevor Page 6:23
It sounds awful. You say to get to 3035 degrees Celsius, I assume that's yeah, so So yeah. So that's like,
Ethan Bradley 6:29
I don't really measurement. Yeah,
Trevor Page 6:32
that's a very, it's very hot. That's, well, very hot for me in I'm Canadian. So I don't know what that would be in Fahrenheit that that's probably I don't know, in the 90s or something. That's my guess I could ask Google but who cares? It's hot. And to be in a in a plastic suit in a tarpit environment with dust everywhere and physical labor. Yeah, it sounds. Yeah. Sounds like science
Ethan Bradley 6:52
to me. The alternate is in winters, right? either. It's freezing work. It's really weird. Either you're freezing. You're outside doing stuff. Or you're in a darkened scaffold with Peters blasting on you. So it's even just as hot as so hungry. Totally moved super dry. Or you have no work for you to work. It's treated as a seasonal rate.
Trevor Page 7:16
Rats. Right. Okay. So not great. i That's a not not a great job, I think for Yes.
Ethan Bradley 7:23
People love it. I don't. Fair enough.
Trevor Page 7:26
And I think you you said something that is, is a very common thing that you hear is that oh, if you're not good at math, you know, why would you get into something like computer science or programming or like, Oh, you're gonna you're gonna do awful, you know, even don't dare do that going into grade 11.
Ethan Bradley 7:44
I really wanted to get into technology like I wanted to do here on Earth, because electronics engineering was the course I was looking at. And so I took like, physics, chemistry, math. A just passed, and they told me, you should switch. Yeah, I did. Well, and I guess treat all that. This is why I wanted to historic masonry was like, history. Gotcha. It was cool to me. But it wore off quit. Yeah. That wasn't my job. Yeah. Which is okay. And it's paid my girls that got one daughter, who's almost two, she was born 2020. Not meant to be a pandemic, baby. But she ended up being one. Same with my youngest son. Yep. Yeah. And now I've got another one who's supposed to be born in any any day now? To do on the 30th.
Trevor Page 8:37
Okay, so if all of a sudden you need to run out the door, we won't. We won't hold you to this, this interview. Okay,
Ethan Bradley 8:42
I did it. I did a couple of years in the military, the Army Reserves as well, just before the boot camp, I actually like left just as I was about to start the boot camp because I was like, This is too much stuff. I want to go in this year, I need to draw up some things to do this. Otherwise, I wasn't gonna be able to do it.
Trevor Page 8:59
So then what? So it's a lot of different stuff. That's obviously none of it's related to tech. What? I'm what yeah, what got you into tech? What, what sort of Oh, yeah.
Ethan Bradley 9:09
Because I always wanted to do that. I like, around when the pandemic started, I was thinking, hey, I'm just gonna try coding. See, see, see if I can do it at all. So I started. I think it was about 2020 ish. I started like just messing around a little bit of pipe on nubile Free Code Camp. See how it is? I was like, Hey, this is fun. building some web pages. I did a couple of Udemy courses. My issue though, was I Google a lot. And I'm always like, I want to do the best thing. I want to pick the one thing that's going to be the best. So I'd like people kept a Python. So I did a bit of Python. People were like, oh, no, JavaScript is everywhere. JavaScript is king. So I was like, oh, it's got to JavaScript. And then I'd be like, oh, people are saying go it was great. Right now I tried go and be like, well, so I'm going to go from there. I would jump around so much I think about like 14 different books and different languages C sharp but book on that. It was cut using podcasts or listening ton of politics. That's how I found your boot camp was while listening to your podcast because at one point I went on a Java stint, as soon as I learned Java was like, Okay. And I did the beginning part of like a code with Melosh. In the core course, which meant I knew what types were and I started the blockchain. Forgotten almost everything else. But yeah, I was not really getting where I wanted to go. Doesn't make sense. It's ADHD, it will add, but now it's technically classified ADHD inattentive type. So I jumped to the new shiny thing. All the time, and, you know, wasn't getting as much progress as I wanted, I had sort of settled on to the Free Code Camp, but wasn't super happy. Because like, everyone's like, Oh, you're not really gonna make a lot of progress. You have like a mentor, and you need someone to ask questions that I couldn't look like, for the life of me find anyone. I joined a bunch of online communities. But still, it's asked a question here, and people are like, Oh, well, you should know that. Or,
Trevor Page 11:25
hey, yeah, it's okay. And how long are you doing that for how much time you spend sort of poking around at like,
Ethan Bradley 11:33
a year and a bit? It was like, Yeah, until well, from like, 2020. Somewhere in the middle there until September, he started boot camp, right. And I did a couple of your little online seminar things that you put out. I think they were pre recorded, but one of them was a lot of
Trevor Page 11:52
Oh, really, I didn't know you tend to one of my live ones. Like I did do a
Ethan Bradley 11:55
live one where you were doing a promotion. You like at a discounted price. Next Tuesday, get a bed. But life goes on life goes on. But yeah, then I just started thinking like, should think he would go to school. But that was looking at prices. Really. There's a college here, and there's also universities, but it's expensive. Yeah. So that's good. Because we're like a baby and family. And we just our plans to buy a house gotten up real fast, because they started selling our apartment. So we're like, oh, well, we can either buy this apartment or we just move and buy a house. So we got a little stuck there.
Trevor Page 12:35
Yep. And that was it. Was that in 2020 that that happened? Yeah, we bought the beginning
Ethan Bradley 12:39
of 2021. We ended up buying it because it's holding us just before the end looks.
Trevor Page 12:45
Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's it's probably already gone up in value, right. It's the market the way it is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we
Ethan Bradley 12:51
bought at 245 It's probably way higher now. Yes. It's crazy around as they're selling 300 something. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna I should mention I'm not in the city city. I'm like in a small town outside Coast city. So yeah, a little jumper,
Trevor Page 13:04
the Canadian that while the most the Canadian real estate market is ridiculously overvalued at the moment. And when you say 200 or 300. To me that sounds like chump change. Because, yeah, in the cities, which is where one of the places where I am is near the city. Yeah, that you can find a place for that. So for
Ethan Bradley 13:21
example, the condoms, like colornews, like a bachelor apartment, where we just lived, where our apartment was that we were renting is now 700 Oh my gosh, yeah. Who do apartment? I'm like,
Trevor Page 13:33
nope. Yeah. So. So that's just to give you a landscape of like, yeah, so hey, why why do you want to get into tech? Well, the salaries aren't good, right? These days, you need a good salary. So okay, so you did a you did over 12 months of sort of prep work. It's a Free Code Camp. Yes. And Udemy courses you bounced around, which is very good base,
Ethan Bradley 13:51
it gives you a big a loop was I know how to do a loop and variables and some basic stuff in about five different languages. But I didn't know how to do it anything real writing any of them except HTML, CSS, I could put a page up.
Trevor Page 14:07
And that's, that's great for, again, fundamentals. I talked about fundamentals in the podcast and getting getting a really solid grasp on the fundamentals of programming variables, loops, data, structures, methods and understanding how they work the inputs, the outputs, it's very, very The only issue there is, and I'm not saying this to single you out, because everybody does this is that spending a year on that is a gigantic waste of time, you can get that solid understanding much faster than then in a year. And that's what you'll get from universities. Well, the first year of university is going to be that stuff, right? And it's if you already know it, it's like, oh, but you can get it. You can learn it pretty quick. But anyway, I don't want to toot the horn of the bootcamp, you know, but that's sort of what that's what you get. As part of any bootcamp I get. I talk about mine, obviously, but it can be any bootcamp, you're gonna get that fast paced learning and you're gonna have a mentor to help facilitate the fast Feet, right? You're gonna want to, you can ask questions and get immediate help. That's useful help not oh, you should already know that or just go Google it. Right? Although will sometimes say go Google it if it's something that you should be able to Google Crosta
Ethan Bradley 15:13
question on. Stack Overflow faculty understand?
Trevor Page 15:17
Yeah, exactly. So that's where something like a boot camp can really help speed things up. Right. So So you, you found the podcast, you started listening and you say, oh, you know, this, this coders campus boot camp? Sounds interesting. And you sort of you dove in? What was that experience? Like? What was was that? Were you panicking? Were you second guessing? Are you confident? Yeah. How did you feel?
Ethan Bradley 15:38
So I was super hesitant, and then I contacted you. I don't know if you remember emailing me back and forth. Maybe an email a lot of people I was I was concerned about pricing, because like, I don't know if I could afford this every year like, Well, I was like, maybe November, I can afford it. So I was planning my plan was to start November, actually. And then you're like, Well, I have this free beginner's course, try not to get like, ready. That's how I'd like did it. And I did it in a week and a half. And it was supposed to be four weeks of stuff. And you're like, Are you sure she should be waiting? You get to this, like, you're already ahead of the bootcamp. And you were really good about helping me. I did like the income share opinion. You probably needed. If so basically, there was like a down payment, which was paid you were helpful and setting that up. So it was easy for me to do. And then I didn't have to pay until after the bootcamp when I'm making over a certain amount money, which I'm about to start. And we work to start paying next month, I
Trevor Page 16:50
believe, yep. Spoiler alert.
Ethan Bradley 16:54
It's nine point something percent of your income until it's paid off for two years is what I believe.
Trevor Page 17:01
Yeah, it's it's, is that I can't I can't recall the specific I should know this. I think I think it's a three year maximum. It's either you pay for three years, or you hit the pay back balance, which most people will hit that in two years. I
Ethan Bradley 17:14
think that's yeah, we will. I'm going to show that pretty quick. Yeah,
Trevor Page 17:19
for sure. Even at the salary you're at right now. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. If you want to share that those numbers, you'll, you'll for sure. Hit that. So you're probably in about two years. So that's that's the average payback period that we see. So the beauty of the ISA is it, it allows you to get started for a lot less money, and you defer the rest of the payments until you know after graduation, so to speak. Yeah. Now I wanted was the only way I could afford to do a bootcamp, which is the way that those battery jority Yeah, that's you're not alone there, right? Most, I would say maybe 10% of the people pay the full amount upfront, maybe? Maybe 5%. So it's a lot of money, man. It's people who are looking to change their careers like yourself. There's sort of three groups that people fall into the career changers, which is where you are Ethan and where most of the people about half the people are coming from careers have nothing to do with tech. And they want to get into programming because this is the you know, the restaurant managers, the electricians, the Yeah, stonemasons, the landscapers, the, you know, these are all you know, what a janitorial staff. I don't know what the PC term for janitorial status, you know, this isn't on tech related issue. Sandy Yeah, something like that. So that's the majority, and you just in those types of jobs, you don't, you don't tend to have a lot of cash lying around. So you can't afford to pay for it upfront. So that's where something like the ISA helps. Now,
Ethan Bradley 18:33
I was talking to paycheck to paycheck. Exactly. My wife works to like, it's not like we don't, we're working, we're getting less expensive.
Trevor Page 18:42
Life is expensive, especially these days. So that's where the ISA helps. Now the downside to the ISA is you, you still have to pay it back eventually. Right? It's it's a, you know, if you choose to, to join, and then you don't graduate, because you don't put in the effort, eventually you start to pay it back. So that's this, this particular approach is only good for people who are willing to and ready to put in the amount of work that's needed to cross the finish line. And that's what I want to sort of transition the conversation into is what was the work like? So you talked about how, you know, you were hesitant, but the ISA allowed you to join the boot camp, and then you eventually chose to join the boot camp. What was the word like there? Even when you join late, you still You did great. You did a boot camp very, very quickly. But what was the work like how, what was the How hard was it? So
Ethan Bradley 19:32
it was difficult. A lot of issues. There's a lot of like, I knew the basic concepts, and I did the prep course that you have. So I was able to jump a little bit ahead, but then you hit like new stuff and you're like your brain stops for a minute. The way the bootcamp was set up for me was like perfect. Because of the way my learning style and the way my brain works. So we have like the video content every week. I actually need you to Ah look at where students change how the beat can run slow, we can get more content fast. Oh, that's right. I forgot that that was an interest to you. But he released more more weeks of videos. Yes, yes, yes, it's the video content. And where I can watch it like I could be doing something. Because we only got like a, an hour or two per night where I could sit on my computer. And that wasn't even every night, I could do that. But I could put it on my phone. I know, in your videos, you say don't watch Oh, and it worked pretty good. But I could put it on. Like, while I was doing something, I could be like, washing dishes, put the video up there. Watch and repeat. Listen to the concepts. The way my brain works is I remember where you would say something. And like, then reference back to it. So the key for me I found was I could watch those videos, even on my break your launch. And I had eight hours doing a mindless job where I could just think about it. I just like go through the examples in my head. What is this? So that I could sit down and do the work later? That was really important for me. That's a really
Trevor Page 21:11
thing. Yeah, that the the way? Like, first of all, I can't even I didn't know that. You would what you were watching on your phone, and then even then you were maybe doing one or two hours every other day or every third like that's and the speed. The reason why I say that that's surprising is Ethan was able to get through it in I don't know, four and a half months, the whole day, which normally it's six months. And right now, we've already introduced a nine month version of it, because people just can't go that fast, especially if they're brand new now you would fall into the six month because you already had 12 months of experience already. But yeah, that's still very impressive to do it in like four and a half months that
Ethan Bradley 21:50
time away from keyboard was was key. And I think that's right, yes. So I would watch through the videos, the first half of the week, I'd take a couple days when I would like be watching videos. And then I would read through the assignment. And I would think about the assignment in my head, eight hours a day, while I was chipping joints or putting money into cracks in the wall. So late by the time I sat down, I had a plan in my brain. So it was just a matter of good stuff fit on the page. And then debugging was finished. So I knew sort of what was abhorrent, like if I'd he'll bug usually, and I'd be frustrated for the last half hour of my coding session. And then the next day, I might have eight hours where I was like, what could I try? What can I try this and to like enjoy this thing. That it really was really important.
Trevor Page 22:45
Because here's, here's what happens. And I think you you accidentally were given this blessing of this of this constraint. The constraint was you had a job that you had to go to for eight hours. But the benefit of that job is it's pretty mindless. So the the the what you actually fell into is what some people do the opposite of which is they immediately just start coding, they read through the assignment and then okay, let's crack the fingers. Let's open the IDE, let's start coding, right? That is the almost guaranteed way when you're a beginner to fail. Right? When you're a beginner, that is not from experience, I'm saying this, this is not a gut feeling this is I've seen it happen over and over again, people will jump into it immediately start coding, and you just start creating this absolute pile of garbage. And you and you start with this pile of garbage and then you try to tweak it. I'll do this and tweak this and tweak that tweet and add this and remove that and it's like you're just it's it's garbage in garbage out. Dizzy is the expression whereas you took the meticulous approach, which is a lot more frustrating because it feels like
Ethan Bradley 23:47
it's slow. I I felt like I was like, Oh, just want to be in alignment computer coding, right? Yeah, exactly. But I'm sitting here on the stupid world during the stupid
Trevor Page 23:55
but that's, I think that that's faster, right? And there's an expression which are saying or something that can it sort of applies here if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far go together. And that's it sort of applies here. The implication here of if you want to go far, then you gotta you got to take your time with it right? You gotta you gotta leverage the group and you have to spend time thinking and not actually typing keys on the keyboard.
Ethan Bradley 24:21
Really good part is Well, I started the September group, there was about two or three people that I but reached out constantly and we were always communicating. And we finished first. Like, it's so important to reach out to the group because like they're working on the same things are working on the daily calls. There's a daily call every day, I was on almost every single one nipping from the scarf. Let's put my headphones in. People had to stop it through mine. scaffold noises but it wasn't bad. I could sit and listen, even if I couldn't talk because there's too much noise. I had the earphones and I could listen watch pee Pull, struggle through problems and getting advice that the next thing like Pete was to use Well, like I couldn't share my screen on the daily calls, like everyone else could to get help debugging. So I would just harass Pete all the time. And who is Pete for the people who don't know who Peter, Peter is one of the instructors. So he runs the daily calls like, daily call, when you show up, you Salish, everybody gets a chance to say like, Hey, this is what I worked on. This is what I'm gonna work on. This issue I'm having Can anyone help me. And then at the end, everyone can jump in and help you give advice. And usually it's Pete giving the advice. But if there's a student there that now they're all together, there's a duck that has already done that they jump in and help out as one. Sometimes it helps the, it explained a different from different points of view. Yep.
Trevor Page 25:55
And that concept of, here's what I worked on last year. So I plan on working on today. And here's sort of what we call blockers that comes from the business world. It's called an agile what's called Scrum. But it's part of a methodology that's used with developing software specifically. So we use that on purpose, because that's eventually probably when you start your job, which maybe we'll talk about soon, when you start your new job, that might be what you're gonna do on a day to day basis, every day, you're gonna say the same thing. Here's what I worked on yesterday, here's what I'm working on today. And you're just gonna naturally be good at it, right? We try to force you to be succinct, which means quick, you have 60 seconds to get all that information, which is needed. When you have a team of like eight people, you don't want eight people talking for five minutes each or more, because then you're sitting in this meeting, not getting anything done. So yeah, it's good. I mean, having the community there little bit of accountability, and specifically reaching out and asking for help. It's so important. Yeah.
Ethan Bradley 26:45
And especially like, I worked along, Dustin, who did the podcast with before, me and Mr. Kind of like a little bit opposites. And it really helped like he would Dustin is he needs to understand what is happening all the time, he dives really deep into things. Whereas I'm like, I gotta do this. I got to learn as I go. Makeup work admin, then refactor the code that's written. So she was always asking you questions. I'll get back to your book and figure that out. Yeah, like, I would have done something and passed an assignment and I would have done it in a not as good way. And he like, asking him asking questions is, can you key? It like, I was like, Oh, I could make that a lot better later. Or the next time that it's gonna be better. And I would just get something working, like write that. And then he'd be like, No, I need to understand it. Now.
Trevor Page 27:42
I was going to hopefully say is, if you don't have like a Dustin or someone who's like that, we try to capture that as part of the code review process. So once you submit your assignment, we have experts who I say experts, we have two two people who have been coding for more than 10 years, each who look at your code and who will give you their feedback. So if you do do something that's really not, you know, good, they're gonna say it well, not, they're gonna kick it back to you and say, You got to fix this. So and even even animatedly,
Ethan Bradley 28:10
they were really good at like, Hey, you did everything great. I had one really like you did everything. almost ideal. So here's some cool things you can add like to make it more performant or things. You can add validation or something, but you just have that info, which was just teaching me new things, which was great.
Trevor Page 28:29
Good. I didn't didn't didn't know that. They did that. So that's, that's wonderful. Yeah. The whole point to it is to try to make you as well rounded as job ready as possible. Right. That's the point of any bootcamp and should be anyways, ultimately, to get you ready for the real world, which I was going to start talking about job. But I do want to touch base on on the topic of knowledge, like, well, job, my brain is going all over. So you, you so you graduated really quickly. And let's talk about the job search first, because I think there's there's some, some knowledge to gain a whole cycle of that. Yeah. So let's talk about the job search. You graduate, you start the job search, how does it go? What what happens?
Ethan Bradley 29:06
Talk? Well, I start by making a resume, which I will deal with the help you help me and then I was in a couple of online communities. There's the resume making course that we got after graduating. So when all right, I sent it everywhere, absolutely everywhere. I think my the most I had out at one point was 400. And that was excluding the ones that had already emailed back and said no. And I think I had about four interviews from that. And the first one, I believe was one where they eventually told me like, yeah, you're nice, but we're actually just looking for seniors. We'll keep your stuff on file, let you know. Thanks. They were fine, but I was like, so bit of a waste. I don't know why you would talk to me in that case, a lot of calls being like, hey, can we set up a call and then I think they actually looked at my profile, it just goes to do it was just a bit of a disaster. And nothing happened. I got to one where they were, I liked their approach. But it was not good for my situation. They were like, We're bit I actually basing our thing more on interviews than the resumes. And like I had react on there because I did a little bit of React view. To learn something spirit ended up being a React interview. And what that taught me was, I really don't want to do react, okay? Only like, I don't want to get front. So at least I learned something from that. And I was like, I need to really narrow this down.
Trevor Page 30:42
So that what did you do? How did you so you'd sent out? You did the spray and pray method, which I always say you get about 1% conversion rate, which is every 100 applications you send out, you get one interview back. So that's pretty much it. The
Ethan Bradley 30:52
interviews were not what I wanted. Okay, it was so then what did you
Trevor Page 30:55
do? How did you fix that?
Ethan Bradley 30:57
So I did, I eventually, you had set up a deal with career sprout, to do some of their needs, which is that a company that helps you do the job search and negotiating, and all those things. And so it started doing that. And he got to the networking side, and realized that I've been doing everything all around, I started networking, and people started talking to me, like, I just messaged a few recruiters, they were like, Hey, let's set up a call, we'll see what we can get to do even the ones that didn't like end up in a job that they at least got me contacts. So I knew people in the area, I was the one and a couple online communities as in the discord community as well, nice. And a local guy EDB a lot of advice. Just by doing this, I was like, Hey, is everyone around here? And then we ended up having a private conversation. He's like, Yeah, you're doing exactly the right. Like you learned exactly the right course, I should mention that. He's like, Yeah, you learn Java and spring and exactly what he taught you for your local area, too, is, it's really important to find out what's your research where you are. That makes sense,
Trevor Page 32:07
which is just go to indeed, and type in different languages and see how many jobs are available. And they aren't really I can almost guarantee if you're in North America, the answers to that, to the to the most popular languages are going to be Python or Java. That's just where all the jobs are right now. So
Ethan Bradley 32:24
we're in JavaScript, everyone learns JavaScript. So it's like, yeah, it's flooded with JavaScript developers.
Trevor Page 32:29
Yes, exactly.
Ethan Bradley 32:31
Not that it's bad. Just thanks. A lot.
Trevor Page 32:33
There's a lot of competition. We could talk about that a lot. But yeah, there's a lot of competition. Yeah,
Ethan Bradley 32:37
the net working, got the conversations flowing, and then ended up working for me to actually get a job was actually through you. I think your dad was able to talk to to meet a contact here in Ottawa for the jobs and I'm about to start. Exactly. Um, so you have anything now? Freaking like leverage, like, and I know you're in my network. So that's what got me my job.
Trevor Page 33:07
It's such that's helpful. Yeah. When you have someone who has a network, it's very helpful for getting a job.
Ethan Bradley 33:13
Yeah. But yeah, once that started actually working, like, because I was I actually applied to that job once before, and no, but as soon as I like, got in, and someone was like, Hey, can you talk to him? They talked to me, and they're like, Oh, this is great.
Trevor Page 33:31
Yep. And the reason is, is because the everyone just does the spray and pray method, it's, it is a very easy thing to do. Right? So everyone does it. The problem with that is when you're on the other side of that, when you have 500 applicants, you don't have time to go through 500 Different people to pick the right one, right? Something has to stand out. Right. And oftentimes people will say, you know, make your resume shine, make your written and have a great portfolio. And yes, those things are important. That'll make you stand out from maybe 50% of the 500. But how are you going to actually stand out? So you're the top three, right? And that's where you need to have some sort of networking connection, a human to human interaction, to be able to say, Hey, listen to me, my name is Ethan, I am a good coder, I think I can genuinely help you. And when they listen to this, okay, I'll give this guy a shot. Right? And then you're
Ethan Bradley 34:23
getting in front of that person, they can actually judge you for who you are, instead of just what you look like on paper because I look horrible on paper for a coding job. I just do. I'm like a great player for eight years. And then a coding bootcamp and right. Like, I'd helped out a little bit in the bootcamp afterwards so that was that was it
Trevor Page 34:44
but you still got a job? Like yeah, I did can be done. So let's leave us alone. It was great. Let's talk about it. So you got the job offer. You've accepted that you signed the paperwork, you start soon. Do you want to talk more about the job itself? I don't know your title if you want to say salary or salary range. To you talk about
Ethan Bradley 35:00
it. I don't know, I don't have a lot of details on what the actual work is gonna be like, but well, you can glean that from Daniel, I'm going to be working with CGI, which is like a consultancy, where I'm basically I'll be on a team, and we'll get contracts. And our team does the contracts in Ottawa heads a lot of government contracts. So I'll be on a government contract where we writing a program for this department. It's written in COBOL right now. And so they're like, Oh, it's a little outdated. We're going to write a new one. Cool. I'm going to be a junior Java slash full stack developers by title, which feels nice to see next. Yeah, a year or two. I could take the junior year off. That's right. Yes. But I am taking a bit of a pay dip because unlike at the top rung of where I am coming from, right, and I'm going into an entry level position, but even then it's I'm gonna be making 55k a year plus benefits Plus, there's vacation a bunch of other things three weeks vacation. Yeah, we're adding paid vacation in my life. Yeah, so you have health insurance and all that stuff. And just paint really pleased. Excited for is the vacation. Yeah, exactly.
Trevor Page 36:17
So that stuff all adds up. And so now you've you've got this job and and and we're on time. Oh, and remote. Very nice. Yes, I'm
Ethan Bradley 36:26
gonna have a brand new baby, so I can work remotely be told to help me. That's also a valuable,
Trevor Page 36:32
yeah, although you'll regret that later. But anyway, it's nicely I'll be like, okay, honey, I gotta go to my job now and then leave. But the depends on the person. So I see that I've been working remote for 10 years. So I've been in the thick of it for both of my babies. And it's a lot of work. So So yeah, you have this job. And oftentimes people will focus on that starting salary, right? They're gonna say, you know, I'm not gonna take a pay cut. Like that's, that's ridiculous. And that ended up and what they don't see. And it's frustrating is that the first job and the first pay that you get, lasts for maybe 12 months, right. And then after 12 months, your your world opens up, you can now you don't have to stay with CGI, if you don't want to, hopefully you will. Because they're a good company. I've worked with them before. They're good people, they take chances on juniors, I think they should be rewarded for that with loyalty. But that's up to you. You can always play the field and go and get another job after 12 months, right? And so many more doors open up and now you'll have multiple companies reaching out to you saying hey, I want to hire you. And now you can say, I don't want to work for you unless you hit this number. And then you can jump right back up to where you weren't where you would topped out. After eight years as a stonemason. I forget the the brick and stone use brick and stone mason, I want to be accurate. So you can now take the top of what took you eight years to achieve as a brick and stonemason. And then do that at year two of your of your coding job right now, probably somewhere around there.
Ethan Bradley 38:00
Well, like the way I see it. I've got the starting salary. Okay. This is not a horrible salary in as far as salaries go. Right? For an entry level position in Canada, Canada's a little bit lower. So yeah, yeah. I mean, should I've negotiated the higher maybe, but I also negotiate my way up to five, detach it. Okay, good. So I'm happy with it. But now, I can prove, prove what I can do. And I think I get to discuss with them every year. Like, if I want, you have a ball, absolutely, I just spend a year and I need to get
Trevor Page 38:41
so the piece the piece of advice for you. Just Ethan although this helps for anyone else listening if they're in a similar position, when you have an accomplishment in your job now for next fall months, write it down, that's something I did not do. Write it down when you when you get any praise from your boss write it down date. And and you know, accomplishment, it may be even if you want to go overboard get like the email or something so that you can build a case for yourself a year from now. Because if you just walk up to your boss a year from now and say I deserve a 10% raise or a 20% raise or a 100% Raise, they're gonna say okay, why? Because they probably couldn't give it to you, you probably will be worth that. But you need to prove that you're worth that right. So that's the one little piece of advice that I did not do that you should is just keep track of it and say, you know, I I actually tend to work 50 hours a week or whatever the case may be and I'm only I never charged you for it or something. So I don't know, whatever it is that you feel allows you to provide value to them write it down. And anyway so super exciting. You've got the job you start soon you're gonna get all this experience your career trajectory is gonna go up and up and up. Once you get senior level like where I'm at and I have 15 years experience or maybe yeah, maybe 15 Maybe more I forget. Now once you get to like five or eight years experience, you didn't get to start swatting away deals for like 150k 160k Hundreds Then, like the the numbers, it seems like it seems like play money. It seems like something that's just not real, like how can ever you know, but that's just the reality of coding. It's, it's, it's ridiculous
Ethan Bradley 40:11
like 100k for me in my glass career just seemed like unachievable, unachievable exactly right. Like, unless I work a ton of overtime, which they don't always pay overtime, like, ton of hours never see your family going, like, I can see it now. And let's say I have a plane, I'm gonna get there. Yep. So it's, it feels like freedom. To me.
Trevor Page 40:36
It's good. I'm glad. And that's and that's what. So this is the end result. Right. So if I'm talking now about from the terms of marketing, from, you know, talking about the bootcamp or any bootcamp, there's a before state and an after state for the student, right. In this case, Ethan. Ethan's before state was job he hates you know it, okay salary, but, you know, lots of uncertainty around, you know what sick time if I'm sick, I don't get paid. If there's a strike or something, I take a pay cut in the winter, sometimes I can't work, you know, whatever. The before state is like a frustration, and I just am not happy. And I and I could do so much more, right, there's so much more in me that I have that I can do. And then you go through this transition, which is the boot camp. Now this can be done without a boot camp, this can be done on your own with self paced learning, it just takes a whole lot longer. And the chance of failure is a lot higher. I've said this many times, I don't need to go into the details. But that's just a fact. And then the after state is where we are now, which is this oh my god, this like, feeling of more light like this and like less pressure on the shoulders. And it's like, okay, like, I can see now this path and this amazing. And that is the key that you need to hold on to in your brain when you're starting out. Because that middle part in the bootcamp sucks. It is hard, right? And I've tried to express that. And I tried to say like to hit the brick wall of like, your something doesn't make sense. And you feel like you're never going to understand it. And like, it's, it's hard. And you need to remember the after state, you need to remember the ossicles.
Ethan Bradley 42:07
Specifically, I was trying to learn SQL and databases. And I was like, I think I did three different one on one calls with Pete in a day just like ranting, why this to stupid, it doesn't make sense. Horrible. potentially be like, Okay, take it hour, we'll come back later. If you notice, like I clicked on his new dishes. It's, it's frustrating. But like, I spent so many time just ready to get Pete about things. But like, I had to keep this in my brain, I set my goal. If I can do the end of this, by the time I'm 50 I could spend my winters in Brazil. At the end of the day. I close my laptop, walk outside, the wife hands me a coconut and we're sitting on the beach.
Trevor Page 42:53
Beautiful that is that and you have you have said that it really Yeah, you've you've you've kept that same, you've been saying that for months. So you have a very specific image of your, you know, after state your even your after after state, you know, somewhere down the road and you know, 10 or 20 years from now, the they could work from
Ethan Bradley 43:12
anywhere. So like let's say I'm a senior and people are like begging for me to work with them. I'm like, I can go anywhere you want
Trevor Page 43:18
anywhere. Man. The job I have is yeah, the job I have the company is 100% remote. There's like the the they have like 400 people working from like, 50 different countries don't quote me on that. But it's it's ridiculous, right? It is truly remote. They are never going to ask me to go into an office ever. Because if they did, they would have a nightmare on their hands of people like so those jobs exist. And they pay really well
Ethan Bradley 43:42
you go to the store, buy those 150 Sounds good.
Trevor Page 43:46
So okay, so there's the after state just so if you're in a before state right now, if you're in a position of like, oh my god, I can't do this, and I hate my job, and what are my options, and I'm not good at math. And I'm not I never do well in school, and I don't think I can do you know, it's, you know, the first thing I do is probably dip your toes in the water do kind of like what Ethan did try Free Code Camp, try some Udemy courses, dip your toes in the waters just know, it's still gonna be hard, you're probably still gonna be frustrated, you're probably still gonna feel like you're not getting anywhere and but you do want to just see if you're at all if there's still an interest if you still wake up the next day curious about how to solve that problem. Like, if you're still coming back to it, that's probably a good sign. Whereas if you're like, I never want to see that like you
Ethan Bradley 44:27
want to do like you every time you're doing something else. You're like, I wish I could be doing this. Wishing
Trevor Page 44:33
That's a great feeling. Right? That's that's what you know, you're meant to be doing this. So I think that
Ethan Bradley 44:38
like I could do that from within job like it's
Trevor Page 44:42
it feels like cheating is what I say. Feels like cheating. Because like, yeah, to get paid to do something that you'd like you'd probably be doing anyway. Like it's it's feels like cheating. So So if if I don't know if you have any advice for someone who's who was in your shoes, before you did the bootcamp, is there any thoughts or advice or anything that you could get? Give it's okay if you don't have any. But is there anything that you would say to someone who would be like, yeah, just starting this journey right now, and listening this podcast
Ethan Bradley 45:09
we play, we're not in a bootcamp, I would say, maybe see if you have option to join one, not that it's necessary. But if you're not going to meet up, try to do that kind of stuff, meet actual people, you're going to need people to help you. There were no meetups here, but when I joined the bootcamp, you need to take it in, get them really paid for it. So like, the takeaway is a Trevor, if you're in his boot camp, eat all the other people like I was on Slack all the time trying to get every meeting and good. So it's like, it's just like, in my boring work. It was like this little highlight outward spin thinking about coding with people. And just take advantage of every condition.
Trevor Page 45:56
Absolutely, because some people don't, some people will join the boot camp, if that's their journey, and great, there's some people who I've barely heard from, they graduated in the boot camp and got jobs on their own, I may be put, I maybe had three hours of conversations with them through the entire process, hey, some people can pull that off. That's rare, it's much more likely that you're going to have people who are banging down your door asking for help. Those are people who do great, right? The people who I know really well are the people who succeed, the people who I never hear from are very likely to not succeed. So don't also just join the gap and not use itself.
Ethan Bradley 46:31
It's about it's not so much about just the coating, it's like meet the people, these people are going to, you're going to know that. So later on you might need you might need an introduction and that person knows someone like it. And you've made that relationship. So it's not weird for you to just be like, Hey, man, how's it going? I'm doing this guy trying to look for a job. Do you know what he would absolutely be doing? Like, that's how I got a job.
Trevor Page 46:58
Absolutely. And that's how I've gotten a job in the past before I needed a job. And I've told this story many times, so I won't go in detail. But I went from sitting down with my wife one night saying, oh, I should probably pick up another job to 24 hours later, I had a job offer 24 hours. And that was because of my network. I reached out to a few people. And one of them said, Yeah, I could probably get you hired. Let me check with my boss. And they had a conversation with the boss, the boss called me and said, Yeah, I mean, we were looking for some help. Would you be willing to start on Monday? And I said, Okay, sure. Done. 24 hours, I had a job. And it was, yeah, I think it was, uh, that one was 140k with a potential up to 10% Bonus annually lay that in 24 hours. So it, it it's insane. Well, that's a living for 50 off, which is much better than 400 Plus applications. Yeah. So the network is very important. So yes, build those relationships in the bootcamp or wherever doing meetups, whatever worked on you. And because it's, it's it pays dividends big time in the end. So cool. I think we're, I think we're good on time. I know this is gone long. I can talk about this stuff for hours. Anything else you want to say? I know some people sometimes who listen to these things want to reach out to the bootcamp students to pick their brain? Would you be interested in having people like, I don't know, email you or message you on LinkedIn or anything like that to pick your brain?
Ethan Bradley 48:14
I mean, yeah, I mean, the slack. If anyone's in the prep course, were like, I'm on LinkedIn, you can grab me see my pace.
Trevor Page 48:23
Okay. So I can share your I'll share your LinkedIn, your LinkedIn profile link on on short, Elektra, something, they can go and click on it and talk to you. Totally cool. Cool. So there you go. So you can connect with that with Ethan. And in your message, just say, Hey, I'm a potential, you know, bootcamp student or something. And then he'll know to accept your, your, your connection request. What's something good, you'll build Ethan's network? You can build your own network. There you go. Wait. So it was an autopilot. There you go. Perfect. So yeah, thanks very much for taking the whatever hour whatever it's been that we've been chatting. We've got overtime. And yeah, I can't wait to get in touch with you, Ethan. And see how your journey goes in year one, and two, and three, and five. And eventually, you'll have to take a picture of you on the beach with the coconut and send it to me, because that'll be a good one. So it'll be fun. It'll be fun, man. So thanks so much for taking the time. And I'm sure we will hear from you again sometime. But you take care. All right. There you have it. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Trevor back from the future present. I don't know how you call it after the interview took place. And yeah, just wanted to say thanks again to Ethan. He really was very generous with sharing his his thoughts and his feelings about his experience. And again, so proud of the guy. I can't say enough how incredible he did in the boot camp just because he put in the work. You know, even though he had a pregnant wife, and even though he he had a job and you know, although it wasn't constrained on his time. I think it was an O overall a good thing that it forced him to think about how he would solve the coding problems that he was, you know, at any given moment working on right. So many students will just just dive right into the code. And I, you know, I was to blame, I did that as well, when I was new to coding, you know, way back, when I first started, I would just jump jump into the code to without really thinking much about it, because I figured that was the most, you know, the quickest way to get across the finish line.
Trevor Page 50:27
But now, seeing all these data points, I can see that's not the quickest way across the finish line, the quickest way across the finish line is to think is to plan ahead of time is to not write code until you understand all of the high level steps that need to be completed in order to solve whatever problem you're working on. So Ethan was forced to do that on his job, his, you know, repetitive and mindless job, he was able to think about all the those steps in the high level and what could work and couldn't work. And as you heard, I think that was a big asset. So definitely a big takeaway there. And also the whole, you know, hey, don't just spray and pray with your applications. You know, 400 plus applications with zero success is frustrating to anyone. So, yeah, there's always a better way. So leverage networks. Obviously, if you're interested in the bootcamp, hey, you know all about it, coderscampus.com/bootcamp, we have, you know, student alumni who are able to, you know, you're able to rub elbows with them, and get access to some of their network, and contacts, as well as some of mine, and hopefully, drastically increase your chances of getting a job. So these people that are getting jobs don't have degrees, these people that are getting jobs, you know, they just did the bootcamp, right. They just put the work in and the effort in and then follow the advice that they were given. And, you know, did what I said, and then hey, lo and behold, they got jobs, imagine that. So, you know, it's, it's, it's not a hard thing to do. And it's a, it's a simple process, I should say, to simple process to follow. But I guess it is hard to stick to it. Because it can be so frustrating. Anyway, I've done all this before, if you want help, if you want guidance, if you're someone who is driven, who doesn't, who won't stop until they get that job and are able to, you know, have this amazing, illustrious career as coders. As I always say, we are so spoiled as coders, you know, my my, I also work in the world of coding still, because I like to keep my skills sharp, while also doing this whole boot camp thing. And my salary now, I mean, it's, you know, it has the potential to be above 200k. Now, so it's like this, it is so unimaginably rewarding, to be paid to do something that's fun, right, and not only just getting paid to do something, that's fun, but essentially get paid what like, three or four times the national average salary, you know, it just feels like cheating. But anyway, you can't just have that as the goal. You can't just say I want money, money, money, money, you know, you have to actually like a little bit of what this is, you know, this, this coding stuff. So if you've dipped your toes in the water of coding, and you still like it, but you're struggling and you don't know, you need guidance, and you don't know what to learn, and you find yourself doing the the hopping that Ethan was doing in the beginning where he was learning a little bit C sharp, but then he was learning a little bit of Ruby on Rails because someone said, hey, you need to learn Ruby. And then he learned about JavaScript because someone else said, Hey, you got to know JavaScript. And then he learned a little bit of Java because someone said, Hey, Java is the best and you got lots of jobs with Java. And then someone else said, Hey, learn, you know, C++ because Bob, and you know, he's just bouncing around. It's like, No, you need to focus, right, you need support, to focus on one path, make it through that path to completion. So that you can open up the next step in your, in your journey, which is ultimately to get a job. And then hey, if you want to switch to another language, knock yourself out. The hardest part and the most important part is to get that first job. So this bootcamp is going to help you with that. It's going to teach you one stack one very popular stack. People always ask why teach Java, I teach you how because it's like the number one most available job you can get. And the skills that you learn as a Java programmer Trent are transferable immensely to other languages. And you know, web developers are our, you know, always in demand and you know, learning Java as a back end language for web development, as well as some JavaScript. I mean, it's just so oh, it just, it's so good and so helpful and it's so
Trevor Page 54:50
widely spread available. It's so there's so much opportunity, it's just you need to put in a lot of work, right that's what this comes down to. If this were easy Not everyone would be a coder already. Okay? It's not easy, but it is simple. And we are here to help. We are here to put you on that path and get you across that finish line. Like Ethan and like Dustin before, before him and like many of our students who graduate and gotten jobs now we're here to help you along that journey. So if you are dedicated if you want to get this done and if you're gonna stop at nothing, then please, please apply. I think we can really help you so coderscampus.com/bootcamp, all one word. And yeah, look forward to seeing you and speaking with you inside of the boot camp, because hopefully you'll apply and get accepted and make it through. And I'll see you on the inside. So we'll see you there guys. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, take care of yourselves. Happy learning. And bye for now.
Intro / Outro 55:48
Thanks for listening to this episode of the coders campus podcast. But before you go, Trevor has a favor to ask you. In order to keep these episodes free. He'd love for you to leave a rating and review the podcast on iTunes. Just go to coaters campus.com/review to leave your own rating and review of the show. So if you have 30 seconds to spare right now, please help out by leaving a rating and review via coders campus.com/review It will ensure that you continue to get these awesome free podcast episodes each and every week. So if you like free swag, head on over to coaters campus.com/review Happy Learning

The post EP59 – From Stone Mason to Software Developer in 8 Months appeared first on Coders Campus.
57 min
May 04, 2022 EP58 – From Electrical Technician to Software Developer in 8 Months
In this episode we'll talk to Dustin, who is a recent graduate from the Coders Campus Bootcamp and managed to land a job within two months of starting the search.
Dustin and I talk about his prior coding experience that he had before he joined our Bootcamp (spoiler: it wasn't much at all), and we talk about his experience as he went through the curriculum.
Ultimately we know how his story turned out, but in this special interview we'll learn about HOW he was able to accomplish the task of completing the Bootcamp and landing a job while also being a father of a 2 year old, a husband, a full-time employee and part-time college student.
We'll also learn about the important lessons that Dustin learned once he began his job search, and what mistakes he was making early on before he pivoted his approach, which then lead to the job that he was offered.
If you'd like to get in touch with Dustin, feel free to add him via LinkedIn here
Interested in starting your coding career?
I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.
It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.
You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp
Episode Transcript
Intro / Outro 0:09
Welcome to the coders campus podcast, where you'll learn how to code from one of the best teachers in the industry. Whether you're an absolute beginner or a seasoned pro, the coders campus podcasts will teach you what you need to know to master the art of programming. And now, your host, Trevor page.
Trevor Page 0:28
Alrighty, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode number 58 of the coders campus podcast. Thank you so much as always for joining and listening in. Today, we've got a good one, we've got another really impressive story from one of the students deep inside of the coders campus boot camp, I want to talk about his story. Today, I want to talk about some of the tips that we will be covering that Dustin, who is the gentleman that we will be speaking with Dustin talks about his experience in the boot camp, what he did during the boot camp to make sure that he was successful in completing the boot camp. And then what he did to make sure that he was also successful in landing a job. Very shortly after graduating from the boot camp, I believe he got a job offer within two months of graduation, which is quite good. And he shares some tips in terms of what a common mistake is that a lot of aspiring coders make when they're trying to get their first job. The thing he started doing this as well. And it was a big waste of time. He then learned that there was a better way to do the job. You know, landing interviews and getting a job, there's a much better way to do it. He'll talk about that. And then I add my own little spin on it and talk about another tip that I always see, again, aspiring employee to coders. Do they make this mistake. And it's so frustrating, because it's like, you're right there. You're right at the finish line. And then you just stop. And I want to talk more about that in. We will talk more of that in this episode. So it's full of a great inspirational story about Dustin and his current situation where he was a father husband employed full time attending some college courses as well as doing the boot camp. And yet he still managed to get the boot camp done on time and land a job within two months of graduation. So all in eight months later, he was employed. He makes a joke later about how you know, you can't even have a baby that quick. And yet I changed my entire career in that time. So it's a really great story. So I want to invite you to listen to it. So without further ado, let's flip over to the interview with Dustin from Louisiana. Let's go. So today we are doing by Dustin Vidrine past bootcamp students. And he currently is residing in Louisiana. I'm sure I probably talked about this already. And yeah, I just want to dive into who Dustin is what his story has been what the outcome has been inside of this coding boot camp that you guys obviously know, I have spoken about this many times since Yeah, I just want to talk about about depth and get to know a little bit more about him. So Dustin, talk about yourself. Let's let's let's learn more about where where you came from? Where were your roots? What were you doing? Before you ever stumbled upon the boot camp that you did? What was what were you? Did you have a job? What was your job? What was your life? Like? I don't know, anything that you feel comfortable talking about? Let us know what life looks like before the boot camp?
Dustin Vidrine 3:29
Sure. First of all, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I feel like I'm going full circle here. So at the time of finding out of the boot camp about the boot camp, I was working at a plant chemical plant, which is about an hour and a half drive from home waking up super early, you know, 233 o'clock in the morning to get ready to go out there work 12 hours, come back home, do it again. So on the commute, I actually started looking at podcasts or anything to listen to, you know, eventually music gets old, or the same songs get old. So it's like I want to have something conversation wise to listen to. And then I stumbled upon your podcast, which is why it feels weird going full circle. Because now I am portant
Trevor Page 4:15
now so you you So you worked at a chemical plant? Would you describe yourself as someone who again, I don't know many of these answers. So I'm gonna find out the same time as people listening to this episode. Would you define yourself as someone who was very tech savvy, not tech savvy at all a little bit tech savvy, like where did you fall on that sort of spectrum.
Dustin Vidrine 4:34
I felt like I was pretty, you know, seven out of 10 roughly in the form of tech savvy because prior to the chemical plant I was actually working in the electronics industry with within a hospital working on electronic equipment and medical equipment. So I still had the tech vibe but it wasn't any, any programmer of any sorts or coder right? But I still wasn't a tech umbrella. So and also at the chemical plant I wasn't an electrical tech So I was still kind of in electronics in the tech field, but I wanted to go deeper and get my feet wet in it without having to go through a full four year university. Because I just, I was ready to get out and do something different, especially after a long commute and drive every single day working the long hours. It was time for a change. And that's when I heard about the bootcamp on the podcast. And I was like, You know what, this is it, I'm going to do
Trevor Page 5:24
it. So it was you said, a one and a half hour one way commute
Dustin Vidrine 5:28
or one way, when we're three hours a day driving, right,
Trevor Page 5:32
three hours of driving, that's expensive, especially now. I mean, we're recording this in late April 2022. Gas prices ridiculous. So I can't imagine how many, you know, how many miles of driving that would be? Oh, my gosh, so and at the job itself? So you're doing some light? Like, what would a normal day be? Like? What what what, what are your normal activities and work that you did at that job.
Dustin Vidrine 5:53
So at the job, we would, you know, I think around 435 o'clock ish, the supervisor would come in and give us our daily task of Whoo, who's requesting what are whatever work needs to be done within the chemical unit that will be stationed in and we'll go out and start doing that, get the permits for you know, you have to get approval from the actual owner of the facility, which would be Dow Chemical at the time, we're still this now. get approval to start working, get your crew together, get your tools together, and head out there and get to it. And once you find maintenance work or maintenance, run wire pull wires to troubleshoot, install, whatever any kind of think of as a glorified electrician, basically, so anything electrician would do, but in the sense of bigger commercial equipment and whatnot. So no, that was it all day long, and you have your lunch break, and then go right back into it.
Unknown Speaker 6:44
And use it for 30 It
Dustin Vidrine 6:46
starts Oh, yeah. 435 o'clock, the meeting starts we've kind of talked, touch base, whatever thing you know, what needs to be done and whatnot, and then head out, head out to the unit and get to work.
Trevor Page 6:57
And 20 to 12 hour days. Yeah, typically go to the floor. Okay. Yeah, your make your I thought I you know, I get up at five o'clock. You know, doing a good job here and being Yeah, being at the job by 430 in the morning. I mean, you gotta get up at like, 230 or something to do that. Exactly. Wow. Okay, cool. So that I see where the where the drive would be to maybe pun intended. Yeah, that's, that's something so podcast. Hey, obviously, if you're if you guys listen to this right now, obviously, you know what a podcast is at this point. So I a very similar thing for me happened when I was doing my job way back when music got tiring, right, you want to start maybe learning something or doing something different? So obviously a great route to go. So I'm glad that you found us through the podcast. So that was your introduction to sort of the boot camp? And how, how much work had you done? I suppose the question is, how long were you actively learning about coding, either just learning about it and not actually doing it? As well as like learning it and doing it? How long? Did you do that? Before you even joined the bootcamp? Was it years, six months, 18 months more than that, and
Dustin Vidrine 8:06
probably less than that, probably around two to three months actually picked up a couple of books on Python, because you know, everything, everybody raves how it's like a good beginner friendly language to get into, especially if you've never experienced and it picked up a Python book, had a laptop, I bring him in to work on my free time, or lunchtime out kind of code, following along in the book learning concepts and practicing, you know, exercises and whatnot. Maybe like I said, maybe two months at most, and then listening to the podcasts. And it was like, Man, I need I need something more. And I don't want to drop this to go, you know, I need to make money. I don't want to drop this to go to a four year, four year university. And God knows what will come out on the other end of that, but I need something now. And that was just enticing. I was like, You know what, let's do it. And I wanted to take it to the next level, because I was really interested in it following along and the books and whatnot, and even some cheap Udemy classes here and there. Just you know, you don't know what you don't know what to do. You don't know what path to take, right? So it's kind of like I'm a Google stuff and see what comes up and read it and everybody points out, you know, start learning this Free Code Camp, get a free resources first and then see if you really like it, or if you think you can do this. And that's kind of what led me into getting pushed pushing it further along.
Trevor Page 9:18
Yeah. And that's really good advice. Because as I said, before I hit record on this, I said, coding boot camps are not for everyone, especially because you know, they come with a cost, they are more costly by far than just, you know, these cheap Udemy courses or, you know, obviously free tutorials. So it's a really good path to try to dip your toe in the water first, right? Like you said, buy a book, do Free Code Camp do. I don't know there's a bunch of great resources out there that are and see if it's even at all of interest to you. It's going to be hard. It's you're gonna not know what the heck you're doing. You're not going to understand 90% of what you're learning. That's a given. That's normal. The question is, do you wake up in the morning thinking about it? Do you go to bed at night thinking about it and being curious about it and like those are the signings, I look forward for someone who has a chance at being successful. Two things I want to follow up on, I say to I forgot the second one already. The first one is you said you've only did it for like, two or three months. And to me now,
Dustin Vidrine 10:16
when free time, which was much per day, right? No, no,
Trevor Page 10:20
this is, this is not to two or three months full time. This is definitely part time you say that. And now knowing knowing I'm able to look back, I have 2020 hindsight in my favor. You did phenomenally well for having two or three months of prior experience. Normally, for people with two or three, you know, less than six months. Now I've learned you really need more time than you know, the typical six months. So you did quite well. Did you do it in six months? I can't remember if if you
Dustin Vidrine 10:50
actually I was I think a week before or maybe right. I was right out
Trevor Page 10:55
that deadline, a little bit of an overachiever. So we'll talk about slightly very slightly less really, it is quite impressive for you know that. So I want to dive into that in a bit. And let me just think if I can think of the second thing that I wanted to talk about. So you're doing it in your free time you were you were so Oh, you said you brought your your computer to work and you're actually coding at work and doing a little sample. So that's also really important, right? It's one thing to have a book to watch tutorials to, you know, watch a Udemy course, it doesn't account for anything unless you actually start you know, fingers to keyboard, right, you have to do the stuff you have to type it in, you have to fail, get frustrated and whatnot to really start any sort of learning. So while podcasts are lovely for maybe, you know, skimming over broad concepts, or maybe getting motivation and inspiration, they're not a substitute for actually doing doing the work.
Dustin Vidrine 11:47
Absolutely. Absolutely, though, it's like I use analogy a lot. It's like watching someone swim. Trying to learn to swim by watching someone swim. You won't until you get in the water, right? Yeah, you might struggle. But eventually, if you keep doing it, you're gonna get better and better and better. So
Trevor Page 12:02
the good news is, was when you struggle at coding, you're not going to drown. Drown. So you might metaphorically drown. That's yeah, we can always help. Yeah, that's what the bootcamp is for. So, so cool. You, you, you learn about the boot camp, just as this is for my own purposes. You know, everyone else listening, this may not be of help to you? And maybe I'm curious what factors led you to say yes to this boot camp that you took the coders campus boot camp? were you considering others? Or was it just like, yeah, I want to do that one, how much time I
Dustin Vidrine 12:30
looked, I looked around and you know, Googled stuff, read it, you know, read, it's pretty unbiased. And some things you know, you ask a question, people are going to tell you their honest thoughts, a lot of places where it's super expensive, and you know, or even fast, like, oh, in three months, we'll have a job. I was like, Oh, I don't buy that. I don't buy that. And then they charge you know, $30,000 or whatever. Right? So what led to this one, it was just affordability and the time duration. You know, of course, you want to get done quick, but you don't want to get so cool. Done. So quick, always feels like you didn't learn anything. So I felt like the six, even to a one year mark would be perfect, because you need some time to actually understand and digest the material. And also the price of it was was nice for me as well.
Trevor Page 13:11
Now you Yeah, the price is always we always sort of we try to keep it as best as we can most affordable as we can. As I said before, my life would be far easier. If I did not run a coding bootcamp, life is far easier just selling online courses. It is so much easier, so much less overhead, there's no staff needed. There's no like, it is so easy to run a bit I shouldn't say so he's gonna run a business selling information courses. But the that's not where the impact is. That's not where you're actually really changing lives. Because there's such a high failure rate for online courses. And I know, I can say that from experience did it for seven years, right? 95% of the people who took my courses didn't finish. And of the 5%, who did finish, there's a smaller fraction of those who actually succeeded in getting a job. Right. So it's just, it's such a high failure rate, because it's so difficult. So I would much rather just do that. But just, you know, it, the doing the bootcamp and getting to know people like you, Dustin, and I can name like, you know, whatever. 50 other names right now that, you know, I wouldn't have the pleasure of getting to know these people and actually really helping to not to be put too fine a point on it, but changing their lives. I don't know if you would agree with this changing your life. So it means something to me. And I think that's a cause that's very much more worthy than just, you know, doing online courses, in my opinion. So having said that, that boot camps are not a magic pill. I want to talk more about your experience in the boot camp in terms of your like, how hard was it? And do you have any stories about did you ever actually want to quit during the bootcamp? Did you ever actually want to break your computer like yeah, let's talk more about that. Of course.
Dustin Vidrine 14:55
Of course. It is difficult to say the least. Definitely good for sure. Get a few times on certain concepts and they'll fight that rated on a scale of one to 1010 being the hardest. 10 being impossible, right? I'd say it depends. So there's a factor. And if you take out the networking aspect with your community, right with your fellow classmates, I guess you could say, if you take that out is probably eight, eight and a half out of 10. Pretty hard, pretty hard, you throw in help of friends and nice community that we have within the bootcamp, that's a six and a half to seven, it makes it slightly easier, but not so much where it's, you know, you pay your money, you finish it, and okay, where's my job, you still need to work, you still need to work, right? It is difficult, but it is manageable, you can do it, I've done it, working full time, I have a two year old, you know, my husband, and I still had time to finish it within the time timeframe. So you don't need to be disciplined. And you do need to know how to do some research. And I think a big factor for me, the way I learned is I need to practice any a lot of practice. So I would watch you know, some of the course material and talk about it with other classmates and then get some hands on with it, even make my own versions of programs and whatnot using the same concept just to really drive the material in because I can't just learn it and then move on. Because you know, two or three lessons down the road other than forgot about the previous stuff material, right? So it is hard, but it is doable. You just need some discipline and some be intuitive, you know, you've learned something on Google stuff you need or you get stuck or reach out, don't be scared to reach out, it's okay to fail. Basically,
Trevor Page 16:38
you're going to use the way I define failure as a cheesy way of saying you never you only fail if you give up. Failure is something that and this might be more part of the entrepreneurial circles that I run in failure is usually and again, this is cheesy, but it's celebrated because it means you've learned something. But I think that that's true. I think when you fail, that's where usually the most learning happens. It's like, oh, that didn't work. Why didn't that work? Right? And you can ask questions and get help. And bla bla, so yeah, I don't. This this idea. First of all, I'm getting sidetracked. Am I want to go. So first of all, the fact that you said it was a six and a half or a seven out of 10. I thought you were gonna say it was higher with the bootcamp. So that's actually that's That's not that bad. So that's good to hear. Now, I want to dive more into the what what you did specifically about discipline because I know that you have an excellent you're doing something right with your discipline, I'm able to talk about that now. Because I want to I want to that's really interesting to me, because like I said, having two months, three months of experience, a part time experience before joining the boot camp, and then still finishing it early doing well in it. And you know, spoiler alert, getting a job. It's, it's very interesting to me. So let's how, what, what is the what is your magic? Your husband, your father of two year old? I know from personal experience? Not easy. Oh, that's I wanted to ask you work. You were working a job, I assume 40 hours a week? Or was it more than 40 or less than 40?
Dustin Vidrine 18:06
Well, the plant was more than 40 because it was took 10 to 12 hour days. And then after starting the Bootcamp for some time, I moved down to a different job actually closer to home working 40 hours a week. Okay, so sometimes it'll go over, but on average was 40 hours a week, four times per hour regardless.
Trevor Page 18:23
So, husband, father employed
Dustin Vidrine 18:29
bootcamp. And if I can throw in one more, one marker, Baltimore's curveball into that I'm also enrolled online in college, university. So I was doing that and actually knocked out quite a bit because it's self paced WG EU if anyone has ever heard of it, also enrolled in there. So I was doing that at the same time. Actually, I started one month before the bootcamp
Trevor Page 18:51
right. Now you say that, how how did you
Dustin Vidrine 18:56
get an excellent I saw him I don't know. For me personally, just, you know, for myself, I don't know I don't see it as a big deal. I just do what I need to do. Allocate time time management, you know, okay, today, I need to focus on this. I need to catch up on this. I just tackle it
Trevor Page 19:11
yet. Do you? Do you have a calendar where you block out time like you say mentally, mentally? So you say okay, you wake up in the morning and say okay, you plan your day, the day the morning of is it the day before?
Dustin Vidrine 19:24
Like Well, I'm working less I'm working on some code, right? And it's like Okay, tomorrow I really need to catch up on this class assignment or whatever it is. So a planet towards the end of day mentally just to kind of get myself ready for the next day's like alright, when I wake up, grab some coffee, grab some breakfast and get to work. Or if you have a full time job you know, any any slot you can or that night when you get home from work or whatever it is, that time is specifically to that goal for the day. And you know, even if it's sometimes I'll put it two or three days in a row like alright, for the next three days, I'm going to crush them. Online core some material. And the next following day I'm gonna get back on some code like I just I kind of flip flop but I'm always like dedicating time and it's 100% that time, okay to me it's like it's kind of a chaos, but there's a method to my madness and guessing in my own brain. There's no like, follow these steps, it's more of just okay, I need to get this done and this is it and this just, that's it, I'm disciplined into it. And that's the goal for the day and I just put it in if I gotta give it three hours, alright, he's getting three hours. So 100% of my time.
Trevor Page 20:31
Okay, so it is it there is planning involved, I would say again, the analogy is you're taking step by step one step at a time, it's one day at a time, and next day, this is why you're not planning out months ahead. You're not planning weeks ahead, more or less, it's just
Dustin Vidrine 20:44
good to make it more structured. But
Unknown Speaker 20:47
yeah,
Dustin Vidrine 20:48
it's been, it's been going well, so far. So
Trevor Page 20:52
it's clearly working very well. Now, for those of you who are not watching, I don't know, if I'm gonna post this as a video format. You might if you're podcasting, you're only hearing this, so you can't see. And forgive me if this is embarrassing. Dustin is in good shape. So are you is it? Would you attribute some of that discipline in there? Is that also part of who Dustin is like, where does that come from?
Dustin Vidrine 21:14
Yes, so I used to haven't done in a while. I've kind of fallen off the wagon. But I was into the strength sports strongman specifically in powerlifting. And that's kind of a regimen, you know, your weeks planned out for the lifts, you're going to do the weight you're going to do and just there's a method to the madness, I guess you could say, after starting school and boot camp and working to try to get a job within the tech industry and whatnot. I've kind of put that on the back burner. But the same rules apply, I guess, you know, you have a goal. And the goal is to do this, and I allocate time throughout the week to do that. And I in a way it kind of carries over. Right.
Trevor Page 21:50
Yeah. There's clearly something about you that that enabled you to get this done. And that's the reason I'm asking is I'm trying to figure out for myself, because not everyone is going to succeed in the bootcamp, I'm not going to make it all rainbows and sunshine, there's a percentage of people who and I know, within 30 days, maybe even 14, when someone starts to boot camp, whether or not they're going to make it right. I have a pretty good radar for that. And I'm trying to be able to, but I only know that once they start, I'm trying to figure out how do I figure that out before they start? So I can save us both the pain of you know, actually failing, which means you know, quitting. So yeah, one one interesting thing I've noticed, and this is with limited data points. One thing that is that is thought of as I've seen as a superpower. And I again, I don't have no idea if this applies to you probably doesn't, who knows, there are a few of my very successful students have ADHD. And this ADHD for one student in particular I was talking to coding was like one of the first things that they that they found that sort of silence their mind that allowed them to truly focus. And this particular student did very, very well, I have no idea if you have ADHD or not, but I'm trying to find these. What are they? What
Dustin Vidrine 22:58
do I think I do? At one point, I was taking medication, he helped me kind of focus, you know, feel Adderall or whatnot, right? The Miracle student drug, right. So but I haven't in a while, but still it does come in and does help slow the brain down. I feel like my mind is just like 200 miles an hour. Right? And it does help slow you down not promoting the drug for any way. But no, no, of course not. Say that. Yeah, I felt like I did have I do have some form of ADHD. Interesting. Okay.
Trevor Page 23:28
I think I think in this case, it's the coding coding is the drug right? Coding is the thing that can help you.
Dustin Vidrine 23:32
And I think it's more of the coding, because you're tinkering with something because it's, you know, you need to focus on a, it's not like, you know, you're coding and watching Netflix and playing around on a game like, this needs to be done. And if you're interested in it, you got to have you have to be interested in it as well, you'll focus on it, right? It's like, if I gave you a bunch of Legos and instructions for the Legos, you probably sit there and build it. It's kind of the same format, right? You got to focus on it. And you're going to you want to see it built. Same thing with the software. So this is my opinion on it, I guess.
Trevor Page 24:04
Yeah, this was not planned. I just I've been building these data points. And it's a hey, there's something that because I feel I didn't feel like some. So one of my good friends has ADHD. And when I talked to him, sometimes I might think I have a mild case of who knows. But yeah, cuz I've done fairly well in coding. And I love coding because it's, it's something that puts me into flow. Like, immediately if I know like what I need to be working on, I can drop into flow. And if you guys don't know what flow is, if you've ever experienced loss of time, if you start should say, well working, you'll be doing an activity, and then all of a sudden, you know, it's lunchtime, or it's summertime or it's bedtime, and it's two o'clock in the morning. It's like wait, what? How did that happen? Other people will experience this like maybe if you feel like video games, he'll sit down and play video game and then boom, all of a sudden, it's like two o'clock in the morning. You got into flow, right? Your brain was so hyper focused on this activity that everything else vanished coding does that for me. I don't know if it does that for you as well, but it's it's it is like a drug. It's fun.
Dustin Vidrine 24:58
For me. It's the days go by you because it's kind
Trevor Page 25:01
of scary. And I've said this before in the podcast, it's it feels like cheating because I enjoy it. And it makes the days fly by and you get paid for it. Right? Not only can you pay well for it, so it feels a little bit like cheating. So anyway, so talk, let's, let's spend a little bit more time talking sort of more about your experience. In the bootcamp, I alluded to the pain and the suffering part of what was fun about it, what was nice about it, what what did you What did you really enjoy about it, if anything at all, I really
Dustin Vidrine 25:29
enjoyed the way you lay it out the material, just, you go through you actually, cuz you're building things, right. Most of the time, in some of the lessons, you're actually building stuff. Actually, whenever you get towards the inevitable, you start using the framework so that now you get to build things you could see come to life. And you follow, you can call along with it as well. And then what I like to do with that is, you know, after the lesson is over, I see a we built a user form, or we can input data and save it to the database, I would recreate it in my own way, you know, if you're using a user or whatever I'll do like a student management system, kind of the same premise, but switch it up a little bit, and then do it without the training wheels, I guess I would call it you know, watching the videos and coding along was great, but that's training wheels, kind of like watching someone swim in order to learn how to swim. Put that off the side, try to build it, it's gonna break, you're not gonna do it the first time. Correct. So, for me, that was I enjoyed that part because you actually did real projects, or at least parts of real projects. And not just here's a for loop. Okay, next, you know, here's a while you actually did something useful that would carry over either to the next lessons or actually projects later down the road. So I enjoyed that, for sure.
Trevor Page 26:39
And with all your free time, you were able to do that. Good to no extra practice. Yeah. And one of the things for me, I think, who was it that? Was it Ethan that asked the question about he, I had said that one point. And he referenced the fact that I said this that I had done something to improve my skills and level up in my career, I forget who asked that question. And my response was, yeah, one of the biggest level ups that I ever had in my career was building my own project from scratch using a framework at the time that was brand new, that might the company I worked for was using that I had no experience in now is called Spring, I built an entire project, a real world project that I had actually intended on turning into a business, and then selling, selling the software as a service as a business. So I actually like had ambitions for this day went nowhere. Put the learning Yes, sidenote, don't start a business. It's so hard. It's talking about the levels of difficulty learning how to code is like, you know, whatever level you're seven, running your own business is like a nine out of 10 in difficulty. And then I would say like being a parent, because maybe nine and a half and a 10. Anyway, don't start unless you like torture and agony, learn how to code instead. So yeah, that's sort of what I did was, you know, building your own stuff going in removing the training wheels. In other words, very, very good advice. Anytime you're going out into the wild and doing it all on your own, you're going to hit roadblocks, you're gonna quote unquote, fail not actually fail, but you're going to hit errors, and have no clue what to do. But when you have the support of the bootcamp, and you have people to reach out to and ask and say, Hey, I'm getting this error, what's going on? That really helps, right? When you when you can hopefully get quick feedback quick.
Dustin Vidrine 28:19
Absolutely. Shout out to Ethan for that he really helps everyone out, he helped me out towards the end as well, getting stuck on even personal project, you know, something that we never covered before that I wanted to implement. And I was like, How do I do this? And, you know, he's a real good help. He's a huge asset to the community.
Trevor Page 28:37
Yeah, so the Yeah, the community super helpful. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how I would do it without all the people. So I don't know what I'm doing the build that that was great. Whatever that was that, you know, you know, so I need to keep doing that. But anyway, not to say that you can only get that in a boot camp, of course, you can get this if you set up your own, I'm sure on Reddit, you can probably reach out to people and set up your own little group to you know, keep each other accountable and stuff. So there's definitely cost effective ways of making this happen. So I don't want to say Boot Camps are the only way to do it. But I try to be organized, I try to have the community I try to have all the support and make it as easy as possible, take it from you know, a nine down to a six or a seven out of 10. In terms of difficulty, that's sort of a way to put it so
Dustin Vidrine 29:20
and to kind of go back to the discipline aspect or surround yourself, this is for anybody surround yourself with like minded people. So like the classmates, the bootcamp the Ethan's of the of the coding group, right? These guys really keep you involved. If you're feeling bummed out or you're losing motivation, or you feel like you're stuck being like this is I'm not signing up for this. These guys will talk some sense into you. You really can't, can't do it without you know, support really.
Trevor Page 29:49
You can but it is exceedingly rare, much much more, much more and maybe the ones that do make it maybe they just they're just lying. They did have extra help and they know they learned it all by me. Self completely self taught coder and all I did was read the Java SDK docs.
Dustin Vidrine 30:05
Yeah, good luck. With that 1% in the world, no,
Trevor Page 30:10
there's always that, you know, point 1% or whatever. But yeah, for the vast majority of people, you're gonna struggle, you're gonna need help, you're gonna need support. One way to do it, yes, obviously, it's through boot camp. But that's not the only way. But having said that, I mean, so you know what, you went through the boot camp post. So you finished a boot camp, you graduated, you got your final project done, you hit the job market? Let's talk about the job search and how frustrating or simple and easy and painless it was where on that spectrum, did you fall a little bit of
Dustin Vidrine 30:40
both? So starting out, you know, right out of graduating, I guess it was tough. I couldn't even get a phone call, couldn't even get you know, I'm shotgunning applications trying to get someone to say, hey, or even looking at me, right? This, I think the markets flooded and you have to really stand out. There's a lot of jobs, but there's also a lot of junior devs that want to get they want to get in. And that's huge. That's that's makes it difficult. You need to stand out. So that was the hard part. The easy part to that side of the spectrum is networking. Talk to a couple people, like, for example, I've shot probably nowhere near some people, I know some people who did hundreds of applications. But I think I've gotten around 3040, maybe 50, most less than 100 applications shot out. No, no feedback. Every you know, two days later, three days later, we moved on to another candidate. It's silence, right? It's kind of shooting in the dark. Well, you network networks with one or two people. And they say, you know, there's an interview setup. Or not, I felt like I'm not the first interview out. It was kind of, you know, I don't know what to expect this my first interview after applying to, you know, 40 plus jobs, right, get the first interview. We're gonna, we're back in two to three days. Well, the next morning, second interview set up. Okay, that was quick. That's pretty good. Make me kind of boosted confidence, right, because the first one was like, I think I did good. second interview, I felt like I crushed it. And then the next day, I got a verbal offer over the phone from the recruiter. So it's like, I literally shut applications out of left and right network with one to two people. And now I have a job offer. So the key to not only learn to code, and practicing and actually get skilled, because you need to know the materials. Well, you can't just have built a To Do app, like my interviews, were grilling about concepts and systems and details on the systems and on the projects and why using, you know, how I used it. And then some abstract things about each concept that you would only know about using the right, you won't really get that just reading some or watching some YouTube tutorial. So kind of going back to what I was saying. Networking was the book that is for me, because literally no other applications that are saying were responded to in a good way network one or two times and then boom, maybe I'm lucky. I don't know. But this had failed for me.
Trevor Page 33:07
I think we'll get more into what so what does networking mean, we'll get there in a moment. In terms of data I love data I'm all about data from what I've seen is typically you send out maybe 100 applications to jobs, you might get a phone call and be invited into an interview once more. So in other words, that's called a 1% conversion rate. So 100 at bats equals one interview. And that's pretty good. If that if that's your current. If you are currently in this process, and you are applying for a job and you're listening to this podcast and you're frustrated, and you've sent out 99 applications and haven't heard back Well, yes, statistically speaking, you'll probably hear back from one for one interview for every 100 applications that you send out. Now, that's assuming you've done everything else, right, that's assuming you have a pretty good resume, that's assuming you have a pretty good portfolio, that's assuming you did all that stuff, right, you'll get one out of 100. In other words, not a very efficient way to land a job, but it's possible, not very efficient. So the success that I've seen for people getting jobs has usually either been completely passive. In other words, they just have a LinkedIn profile, set up with good keywords on it and a link to their GitHub profile. And some recruiter happens to stumble upon them and invite them for an interview. Completely. That's how I got my first job is completely passive. Now it wasn't to be a coder, I got invited to a job that was let's call it a getting your shoe in the door type of job. And then from there, I was able to get my programming job at that company. So you know, I've talked about that before, it took me five and a half years to get my first job. So the the point of just spraying and praying is what I call it, right? Use applications and pray that you'll hear back it's possible, not very efficient, and you learn that so what's more efficient is leverage your network. So let's talk about that. What is what does that mean I networked because that's a very broad term. Right? What specifically did you do?
Dustin Vidrine 34:59
So what I did If I found those different companies in my area, because you know, there's some some remote jobs, but some are hybrid. And I think you increase your chances whenever you can commute, you know not having to relocate. If you're willing to relocate, that's great. But I wasn't. So I was looking for thing for companies in my area that could either do remotely or commute to sew up my percentage of actually landing a job or finding a job. So with that, I found a few people on LinkedIn who worked at companies reached out just to make conversation, see if we knew the same people because it's a small town, right. And if they could point me in the right direction, and tell them who I was what I'm trying to do finished, I just finished the bootcamp and I'm trying to get in the market. Either they could help me or maybe they can point me to someone who could, which ended up being pretty much what happened. So this person is 2530 minutes from me, they pointed me to a friend of mine, which I didn't know at the time works at the company I wanted to get in with. So I texted I have their number. I texted him. Hey, man, I know you worked here. No, I started here eight months ago. I told him what I was trying to do what I would have done and here I am, can you help me or point me in the right direction. So we went have coffee that literally 20 minutes within the conversation meet me here. Let's go have a coffee and talk about it. So what he does is point me to his recruiter which got him on, got his emails set up, you know, setup as nice message. Basically, same thing, what I've done, well who I am, what I'm trying to do. And then this person calls me to three days later, just to fill me out. And I guess you could call it culture fit neat. But check me to see if I'm just shooting in the dark or for actually have some skills, right. And then he told me, he'll get back with me. And that was probably a week later. I didn't hear anything, shoot an email, don't hear anything like oh, man, this one fell off. Then literally the next day after that. I got a first interview invite. I was like static, it's like, oh, this is happening. I went from dead silence to now we have something positive happening. So but the moral of the story is networking, reach out to people locally at businesses you want to get in on maybe they can point you in the right direction. Maybe they know somebody personally, maybe they personally can help you at least kind of put you somewhere on someone's desk, like their resume your resume on their desk or whatnot, just to kind of get some eyes on you. Because clearly, the other path of just shooting, spraying and praying and shooting in the dark wasn't working for me.
Unknown Speaker 37:29
But it's not. It's not
Dustin Vidrine 37:31
the chances are much greater when you talk to someone with human
Trevor Page 37:36
wares. And here's the tip, one good takeaway here is you have to know some people would be intimidated to reach out to someone a stranger on LinkedIn. Right? Well, you have to know and get past like, you might think some feelings you might have is oh, I don't want to bother them. I don't want to like they're probably very busy. They don't want to hear from me. So then therefore I won't reach out and and talk to that person. But what you have to know is if the person you're reaching out to is a recruiter, it is their job to recruit. Right? And they will be ecstatic. If you are a great candidate, and you just landed on their you know, on their plate or lap or whatever the expression is, and then they successfully, you know, hire you, they're going to look like a rockstar to their employer. So and sometimes they get paid for that outside, they get bonuses and stuff. So recruiters want to recruit. So don't by any means don't be shy to reach out to recruiters and they're human beings and they're going to want to stay you know, the worst that'll happen is they'll ignore you. The second worst thing that will happen is they'll say, oh, you know, we don't have any jobs available at the moment. But hey, we'll keep you on file or something. And then you follow up. So that's a second most important thing that you said, Dustin, is you followed up. So many people in the bootcamp currently shoot their shot once hear nothing and then give up. Right, right, which I defined as failure. So you need to follow up the expression that is said and nice in the entrepreneurial circles is the fortune is in the follow up. And it's exactly the same thing here. Just because someone didn't reply to the first email that you sent them means absolutely nothing. Do you know how many emails and messages and text messages and I am inundated with on a daily basis? If I like there are I can name 50 occasions in the past week where I have ignored my own wife. So you know, if somebody ignores you, it's okay. It doesn't mean that they're not interested this, the people are only not interested. If they tell you no, or go away or stop bothering or they're not going to say that they're going to say, you know, oh, we don't know. So yeah. Don't be afraid to reach out to people. If anything, they're going to be happy that you did if you're qualified if you're if you're someone who you know, like Dustin now has the skills, is able to answer the questions is able to show up and deliver the skills that they are looking for. Right his skills were matched to the job that he was offered. And they were how Ready to deliver the offer. And in my opinion, he is going to excel in his job because I just know this industry, I know what companies want. Dustin is going to be just fine. So yeah, those are two takeaways. You got to follow up don't and don't be afraid to reach out to these people. I don't know if you want to add anything else to to that.
Dustin Vidrine 40:17
No, that's pretty good. It's pretty straightforward. It's simple. Say it to say that but it's, it's challenging. You know, I'm nervous. I didn't want to bother anybody I didn't want to this person is not even going to read the messages, right? But you just got to something you got to do. You just got to take initiative in it and execute really? Well. What are you gonna be where I am now, you know, or wouldn't be where I am now is just still trying to shoot resumes out there and hope them something bites, right. So that was a game changer is really is to reach out and talk to people, even human being human. Don't just hop on your keyboard and shoot resumes.
Trevor Page 40:51
What's what's that's a good way to put it. What's more painful, right is sending a message or just continuing to be either unemployed or stuck in a job that you absolutely hate. Right, what's more painful, right? I just send the message. So that that for sure is something I see students struggle with, because I've struggled with it myself. So anyway, we try to do our best in the bootcamp to make that as easy as possible. But yeah, okay, so cool. Now I don't I obviously you can say no to this. Do you want to talk about the actual offer that you got? Or would you rather just not say anything about it? So yeah, it's a job offer. It's good.
Dustin Vidrine 41:19
So no, we can cover some things. Actually, right. Before this setup, I was filling out the actual official HR written offer, I guess you want to call it so it's, it's with CGI. And if there's any in your areas of anyone's listening, it is an international company, I think they're based out of Canada from right to remote, think when I say remote, mostly remote, I think four out of five days or remote one day to go in and update your laptop, your equipment, get the latest security, whatnot stuff, right. And usually, that's on a Friday, and everybody's kind of relaxed, according to what they tell me. So Friday is kind of like the chill day, which everybody goes in the office, meet and greet, hang out, do a little bit of work. And at home, rest of the days are remote. But for me, my role is going to be a Java developer, of course, and then I'm going to be sent to some training in middle of May, which will be more Java stuff. And they told me, I'm going to learn their tools, the way they do things, their process, their workflow, and it's about seven to eight weeks long. Of course, I'm paid full time, day one. So it's not like I'll you know, taking a cut and pay until the training is over whatnot. So it's full pay full time until the training is over. And then I'll be placed on a project. And then also I'll have pretty good benefits. Also, there's unlimited education doesn't, there's actually an employee portal where you can go and learn pretty much anything you want. And it's flexible. So they told me if I wanted to move into more front end stuff, if I want to get away from Java, and I want to do more further and faster learning through the portal, talk to my manager, tell them what I'm interested in, and they will push to get you where you want to be, they're not going to hold you back. So what I thought was awesome, the flexibility to do that pays pretty good in my area of Louisiana, which is not a super high income area, you're going to start with around 65,000 a year, or at 65,000 a year. Like I say, if that were remote was awesome for me, I would have took a pay cut it just the remote port, but get both. So it's a win win. Yeah, of course, all the health benefits and whatnot, and vacation time and stuff possible. You get some stock options, and matching 401 K, etc, etc. But
Trevor Page 43:26
all the goodies and that says this is your one, right? So a lot of people a lot I should say a lot. A lot of aspiring coders, if you will, will focus a lot on that first job, that first salary, and then everything is dictated on it for and I've said to somebody, the first salary does not matter at all, my starting salary for my first coding job, I think was 35,000 Canadian dollars, which is like, I don't know, 30,000 or less US dollars. But if you adjust for inflation, maybe it's like $40,000 You know, it's it doesn't matter. Because now I don't know what I don't even know what I make, but it's definitely over 150 Is what I'm in that ballpark right now. And as as we've talked about previously, I've received not offers but you know, definitely interest in in offers for over 200 So it's the first salary doesn't matter what matters most about this first job is the experience that you're going to get that will then catapult you forward in the rest of your career. Right But having said that, 65k is a great starting salary man.
Dustin Vidrine 44:29
Sit behind the desk right here where I'm at,
Trevor Page 44:31
right so great. Oh, you guys are. This is self serving. I wish my boot camp or a boot camp existed back when before I did university because like I said it took me five and a half years to get my first job. So four years after university probably 15 to $20,000 per year of that four years and then six months of unemployment and then one year of bad employment. In other words, working a job I didn't want to work and then finally I got a job as a coder. So you know to do it in What did you like? How long did it take you to get this job offer after?
Dustin Vidrine 45:05
Two months?
Trevor Page 45:06
Two months? Yeah, that's what we see, you know, somewhere around there is about about right in terms of the data. But
Dustin Vidrine 45:12
if you think about it, what blows my mind is I went from working in the chemical plant to a complete career change and
Unknown Speaker 45:19
eight months in about it's insane.
Dustin Vidrine 45:21
It's less, can you have a baby roughly can't have a baby. That's changed my whole career, right landing something I want remote, decent pay for a start, you know, zero years zero in a pretty good start for me.
Trevor Page 45:34
Yeah. And CG is a great company. Like there's, there's some companies out there that are a little bit predatory, that that offer up. I won't name names, but a CGI is a great company. So those kinds of opportunities are great. So now I'm realizing that I'm almost at time and these conversations go so fast. Is there anything usually I'd like to ask? Because anything in closing anything? Any advice? If, if there is a a Dustin 1.0? Right now, who's listening to this podcast, who is currently you know, eight months behind where you were, you know, like, what would you say to him? Or to her? Like, is there anything? Any advice? Any anything that's on your mind that you would you would say?
Dustin Vidrine 46:10
Sure, I'd say stay disciplined. And remember why you started this in the first place?
Unknown Speaker 46:16
Why did you start this in the first place? With a career change?
Dustin Vidrine 46:20
Something I wanted to do, I found interesting, and I found a little pattern in it. And get to build stuff always like tinkering with stuff, which was why I was always in the tech field was always some kind of technology, gadgets, whatnot. And this was a way to do it from the ground up with software side. Yep. So I was
Trevor Page 46:36
I concur. I also love to tinker and build stuff. It's so cool, again, to get paid to do this is it feels like cheating. But I've said that so many times. So I won't say it again. Wicked. So thank you very much, Dustin, for for joining us today, would you do you want to like sometimes also say, Hey, if you want to get in touch with Dustin, would you want people to like reach out to you and like ask you questions and stuff?
Dustin Vidrine 46:54
Or Absolutely, it helps anyone network. If I can help anyone that we're sure. If I was you're in your shoes, and you needed someone to reach out to, I'd be amazed that this person will listen to me. So yeah, we can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Facebook, whatever.
Trevor Page 47:08
Something we all post, maybe a link again, with your permission, I'll post maybe your LinkedIn profile in the show notes for this for this episode. And yeah, they want if you want, they want to reach out and chat with you. That would be great. I mean, I'm much, much obliged that would help me out because then I don't have to talk to them. They can just talk to you. As you're paying Dustin at this point. So wicked. So thank you very much for taking the time to do this. And yeah, I can't wait to hear I can't wait to hear where this goes from here. So I want you to stay in touch with me. And you will you'll stay in our little slack group. I'm not gonna kick you out. No, I usually check in every, you know, maybe six months or 12 months or something and just see how how the progress is going. Because I've loved that part, too. So thank you very much for taking the time to do this. And yeah, you want to talk to Dustin? Check the show notes. And yeah, thanks very much, man.
Dustin Vidrine 47:52
Absolutely. Thank you, man, have a good one.
Trevor Page 47:53
All right. So thanks, again to Dustin for doing that interview. And hopefully you have received a lot of value from some of the stuff that we talked about in our conversation, you know about how the magic and the fortune is in the follow up of these recruiters. Networking plays the key role when it comes to the job search phase. Don't be afraid to reach out to recruiters, don't be afraid to to, you know, connect with them on LinkedIn, don't be afraid of them saying I'm sorry, I don't have any positions for you. You know, you're gonna miss all 100 of the shots you don't take right. That's the old saying from whatever it was Gretzky or something. And don't just spray and pray, right? Don't just send all your resumes out and apply to you know, 1000 different jobs? Sure. That's one way to do it. It just takes a long time to do it that way. So yeah, those are the biggest takeaways and also obviously, time management and dedicating yourself you saw, Dustin was able to dedicate himself with a wife, a child a full time job while doing a college curriculum, and the boot camp and he still managed to finish the boot camp on time and get get a job. So the discipline that's required there is substantial. So it's you have to ask yourself, you know, do you want this? Is this something that you really want to achieve? Now I can speak from first party experience here with Dustin.
Trevor Page 49:14
He struggled, he struggled through the bootcamp. There were times when, you know, we had chats together where he was really confused. And we had I had to walk him through some some extra coding examples and whatnot. And, and he asked a lot of questions. And, you know, this is he struggled, this was not something that came very easy to him, that he just, you know, trot along through, he put in the work. And some people out there think that, Oh, if I just show up, everything will work out and to some extent that's true. You do need to show up, but you need to stay dedicated and you need to, when you get frustrated, reach out and ask for help. Okay, that's the extra bonus tip here that I'll give is is when you hit the wall when you hit the point where you think that there's just no way that you'll ever be able to understand this concept of this thing, or this bug that you're stuck on, or this project that seems like Mount Everest or something. Whenever you feel that way, and you hit that, quote, unquote wall is what I call it, you need to reach out and ask for help. How, how else has anything done in this world? You ask for help, right? It's done in a team of people. It's not just one person that accomplishes everything in this in this world. You know, the, the person that I aspire and look up to is Elon Musk. I'll be it you know, he makes all the headlines these days, all this crazy stuff. But Elon Musk did not do everything all by himself, right? The Elon Musk is was the visionary. And he was the one who laid out the path and who set up the frameworks and the systems to follow and who held people accountable. But ultimately, it's his team that is able to get the job done. Right. And that is what we do in this bootcamp, right I play I try to play the role as best as I can of leader and, and, and paving the way for you and holding you accountable through this boot camp and whatnot that we provide. So I tried to put all those things in place the systems, the, the procedures, and the the community and the accountability in place, so that you are armed with all the tools that you need to go out and do great things. Because that's all I want for you. At the end of the day, I want you to do great things. Cool. So the great things in this case is learning how to, you know, learn, get this new skill of learning how to code and being able to code and be able to create things from scratch and be able to, you know, take something that's just an idea and turn it into a reality in front of you on the screen that can be used by potentially millions of people, right? That's so cool. And it literally can change and affect the lives of millions of people. Okay, I know, the when you go to work for a big corporation, you might think, oh, you know, this, I'm working for this big evil corporation. And who knows, maybe that's true. But the stuff that this big corporation does is effecting affecting millions of people, right. So it's so cool the the potential reach and impact that you can have, I'll be it, hopefully not through an evil company. But the doors that you can unlock are incredible. And obviously the lifestyle and the the pay and the benefits and everything that comes along with being a coder and talk about how spoiled we are. So it's incredible. And it is, and I wholeheartedly congratulate Dustin for the hard work that he put in. But I just want to say, Dustin was not hugely special, right, he was able to do it because he had all these systems and all this help and all this structure in place, and he was able to be disciplined about it. So if that sounds like you, if you want this bad enough, if you want to finally, do something where you are able to push the ball forward and actually make progress towards getting a job, right? Maybe this is your this is your dream, this is something that you go to sleep at night thinking about how can I just, I just want to get a job as a coder, I hate my job, I hate my current one, I hate my boss, I hate my this I hate, I hate the commute, I have to make a hate, whatever it is, hopefully it's not all from a position of hate. Hopefully, it's from a position of, hey, this sounds like it'd be a lot of fun to do because it is. So hopefully, you know, there's a lot more of that than the hate side of thing. But hate the hate can be a big motivator. So hopefully you're someone who is saying I want this. And I'm willing to do what it takes to get there. If Dustin can pull this off with all the things that he had going on in his life. You know, I think that maybe you can too, as long as you have the same underlying desire to unlock this stuff, because it's entirely possible. Okay, guys, he went from pretty much knowing nothing about code to getting a job as a coder in eight months. Okay, that is it. It's not even all that special. Because like I said, if you have the drive, if you have the desire, if you have more than just motivation, everyone has motivation at the start. You can do this, right? You just need this a system in place the support to help the community, the reassurance, the hand holding, and a good teacher to bring it all home and put it all together for you. So that's what we offer in the bootcamp I've talked about already. You don't need to know all the details, coderscampus.com/bootcamp or even just go to coderscampus.com I'm sure there's a button there somewhere it talks about the boot camp. Check it out. We try to make it as affordable as possible, as you heard Dustin, say, like we are far less expensive than most boot camps out there not to say that we're cheap, right? It's not cheap, because this stuff is very expensive to hire the staff. As I said in this in this episode, it's far easier if I could just do online courses than running an entire boot camp because we're doing running entire boot camp. I need an entire set of staff to help and pay their you know, pay their salaries and put food on their table and it's not cheap, right? So, but we try to make it as affordable as possible. And I don't want to be evil myself and I don't try to make these huge profit margins and laugh my way to the bank. I generally just want to help you guys out and just want to see you guys succeed. get jobs because having interviews like this with Dustin, and there's more to come. It's just such a highlight of this entire process. It is my most favorite thing. It combines my two favorite things, right? Creating content, you know, doing podcasting or YouTube videos or whatever, as well as huge success stories and seeing people's lives change. So I just it's it warms my heart and I love this stuff. So hopefully you can be the next success story, check it out coderscampus.com/bootcamp, and I can't wait to see you in the next episode. Take care of yourself. Happy learning. And bye for now.
Intro / Outro 55:32
Thanks for listening to this episode of the coders campus podcast. But before you go, Trevor has a favorite ask you. In order to keep these episodes free, he'd love for you to leave a rating and review the podcast on iTunes. Just go to coaters campus.com/review to leave your own rating and review of the show. So if you have 30 seconds to spare right now, please help out by leaving a rating and review via coderscampus.com/review It will ensure that you continue to get these awesome free podcast episodes each and every week. So if you'd like free swag, head on over to coderscampus.com/review Happy Learning

The post EP58 – From Electrical Technician to Software Developer in 8 Months appeared first on Coders Campus.
57 min
January 27, 2022 EP57 – From Restaurant Manager to Software Developer
In this episode we'll talk to Yasiin, who is a graduate from the Coders Campus Bootcamp.
We dive into his story about how he started his coding journey as a Restaurant Manager, and went through two Coding Bootcamp before landing his first job.
Yasiin shares a ton of great insights and tips for beginner coders who are hoping to get a job, so be sure to listen to the whole episode.

Interested in starting your coding career?
I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.
It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.
You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp
Episode Transcript
0:09
Welcome to the coders campus podcast, where you'll learn how to code from one of the best teachers in the industry. Whether you're an absolute beginner or a seasoned pro, the coders campus podcast will teach you what you need to know to master the art of programming. And now, your host, Trevor page.
0:28
All right, ladies and gentlemen, fellow coders. Welcome to this next episode in our coders campus podcast series. This is a slightly different one. And as promised in the in the last episode, I am now delivering this interview. So this is an interview between myself and yes, seen who is one of our bootcamp graduates. And, yeah, I just want to sit down and have an honest chat with your scene about his experience, a little bit about his story, and to understand sort of what his path is, and was in terms of learning how to code, right, this is not going to be a sugar coated story, this is not going to be one where I asked him to pretty up all the details. I'm just asking him for his honest feedback and his honest opinion about his journey thus far through not only my boot camp, but another boot camp as well. And sort of what obviously, the outcome was in terms of, you know, the job and whatnot. And, yeah, this is a really good raw interview, I have not edited anything out of this interview. So you can just sit back and enjoy it and hear a story unfold and in before your very ears, if you will, from someone probably just like you who started out in an industry that has nothing to do with coding, and made the transition into becoming a software developer. So without further ado, let's jump into that interview. So yeah, I guess we get started by by sort of, you know, getting an introduction to who yes, seen is getting to know a little bit about your background of who you were sort of before, I guess the boot camp that I run before you join that boot camp, even start give us a little blurb. Yeah, who are you? What were you doing? So my name is Yasiin. I'm a junior developer right now for a company called Brooklyn bedding. It works in manufacturing industry. Before I got started with my journey, I actually was working in restaurants, I worked restaurants for almost 15 years of my life a long time, and managed to complete a server bartender did everything you could think of in a restaurant with a cook at one point in time when I was really young. Besides that, I actually decided I wanted to do something different in life. Um, after managing for a while, I wasn't being challenged enough to like, just keep myself going. And the brain, they were very monotonous job of coming in at same thing every day. And, you know, you always think yourself, you want something a little bit more. So that led me to a boot camp, which was a boot camp, local University of Arizona, and they had their web development boot camp, which is great to start off with understanding your HTML, your CSS, a little bit of JavaScript, and they touched on Java as well, which was great, because it had to give me a good foundation to understanding what what actually coding was, you know, a lot of times you hear about coding, you don't really know what industry or what you're doing, you hear about these coders making six figures, and it's always going to be a guaranteed job, you go to your boot camp, you come out, you make your six figures, which, you know, that does happen for some people, but it's not for everybody. That's something that it takes a while to build up, you have to keep working at it. That's something I found out just, you know, I'm taking a boot camp and trying to get a job right after and you're like, Oh, you don't have an experience. So then you got to grind yourself out, you know, experience wise was great. I actually after my first boot camp, I didn't get a job right away, I actually took another boot camp and then I was able to get a part time job was a hourly wage, which was great, I found that to be the most developing wise, because the kind of challenge meant will the real world like working experience, because you don't really know if you've never worked in the industry before, what it's going to be like to actually work on a project. That's something that you got to you have to actually be in the industry and working in it and you have to get first job or internship or, you know, pretty much I would say take the first job you get no matter what the pay is just because you want that experience experience is gonna make you 10 times better than what you were. I wasn't very confident in the beginning. That was something that was kind of lacking just because you don't really know like you've never worked in industry. I worked in restaurants my whole life. Like I don't really know what happens and the development industry. Now I get to see the days and days out and you know it's a different side of things.
5:01
Yeah, so that's a really good, really good. I have a few million questions that came up as you were talking. So in terms of so you didn't restaurants for 15 years? How How would you rate yourself in that period when you're working with restaurants? In terms of your technical abilities? Were you like one being, I don't even know how to operate or turn on a computer and 10 being Yeah, I worked at Google or something. Well, you say your your skill set was, you know, while you were working in the restaurant industry, well, my skill set was never my skill set around computers with great because I went to I grew up in on technology engineering school. So from grade school, pretty much from first grade all the way through high school, I went to engineering technology, magnet schools, which are they're based, that's what they're teaching you the basis. So our foundation is that and we learn everything else with it. So I could operate a computer, I knew how to surf the web, I knew how to, you know, look at different stuff we mostly use like Excel sheets. And I remember in through that through, I even want to hit college, we took I took one of the classes we built, we built a website, but I think I was using Dreamweaver at the time. So a bunch of stuff. And I didn't really know what was going on. And the way they built made it build a website wasn't like building a real website. It was, you know, some of the questions I remember, she was like, I forgot the thing, but just changed it a little icon on the top of the tab page. That was one of the questions we had to do for one of our assignments, VIP credit for that, which, you know, that's something that stuck in my head, just just doing that this little stuff. So I had experience to it. But I didn't realize at the time before I started software development, what experience I had until I actually got into it. And that's that's pretty common. Most people have familiarity with a computer, they know how to surf the web, they know how to use Google, you know. So that's sort of what in terms of my boot camp or what I run, those are some foundational things that you just sort of have to have, if you don't know how to use Google, you're you're not in the right place, you got to go learn that skill first. So that's good to hear. And in terms of you mentioned, you took a different boot camp, first through the University of Arizona. And first, how long was that boot camp? If you remember, the boot camp, I want to three was 24 weeks, put in four weeks, about about six months. That's about that's a life length, the size boot camp. That's that's a good size. And you learn about some of the fundamentals of the web. So HTML, CSS, you mentioned Java, did you do like a little bit of JavaScript there? Yeah, a little, mostly JavaScript, Java was just touched at the end, we didn't go too deep into it. And we were already building projects. And we worked a lot with React what they had as the foundation they had to build in. And and so you did the six month thing you did, you know, essentially a front end development that's in terms of the industry. And you know, knowing what I know, that's sort of what that job, potential job could be as a front end developer. But you said you graduated, then didn't get a job. So can you talk more about that? Why What Why do you think that didn't happen? Why do you think you didn't get a job? Were you looking for like, a two weeks? And then you gave up? Or was it six months? Or sort of how long was that journey and that kind of thing. It was mostly just building my LinkedIn and applying to jobs that popped up. And, you know, a lot of experience when you look at it says, oh, I want five years experience and two years experience. And, you know, sometimes it's a two year experience, but then they wanted a senior developer and then you know, you look at everything. And no matter what, when you apply to that a lot of no responses were you know that we need a little bit more experience, we're looking for somebody more experienced and you get recruit, a call will pop up and the recruiters work and help you out and try to get the job. And then they would call you and be like, Oh, that the company wants more experience. They want you to work more at everything. That was just something where it's like, I guess, you know, when you first started off six months of learning, any type of development of boot camp, you're not really into it unless you had prior experience and you are kind of working towards something else. That's, that's pretty like a blocker yet. Yeah. So from my from my side, just get shedding some light on that problem. This is, again, I don't want to I don't want to generalize, but from what I've seen is for front end development, a lot of boot camps just focus on front end development. It's it's a it's a great skill set to have it is it is entirely valuable. By no means wasted effort to learn front end development. But if that's all you know, that's what a lot of people, there's an oversaturation of people in the market who have that skill set. There's another skill set that you can tack on to that, that makes you full stack that makes you well rounded, you know, on all on the full, you know, in range of being able to develop an application. When you're a full stack developer developer, there tend to be more opportunities at entry level, from what I've seen. So that's sort of my one critique on a lot of boot camps is if they just focus on front end. Sure, some people can get a job. Like you said, Some people can get six figures out of the boot camp depends on where you live. And those are stories that you hear amplified. Yep. Right. And it's
9:54
amplified and you're like, I'm gonna do this I'm gonna be that guy. I'm gonna do it. You know, and you sometimes you're discouraged because you're not that guy. And you're like, who's getting these jobs? And you know, and then I realized now who's getting the jobs and those people, they don't just come right out of the boot camp, they have more experience. They they either know somebody in industry looking to hire or, or they've already got their foot in some other way. Like they work for a company that's actually hiring. This was them pushing us up to the next level. But it's, it's, it happens, but it doesn't happen all the time. That's a run the big false is false things I've learned. So I know, that's marketing, right? That's the marketing the marketers doing. So getting people into, you know, their, their, their boot camps. And, you know, so that's, that's also one question you can if you if you're a student watching this, and you're considering joining a boot camp, a good question to ask is, yeah, don't tell me the top the best stories like what's the average case? What's the on average? What are your you know, graduates get? On average, what is your graduation rate? On average? What is your placement rate x, you know, that kind of thing. So, right. That's it, sorry, good. Yeah, upon graduation, that, I would say you got to keep working out things. I say, take your job, take a job no matter what it is, and work at it for a full year and just devote yourself even if it's not too high paying, I was working two jobs at the same time of working still in a restaurant as a server. And I was still doing the part time because that meant more to me to my development of getting myself to the point where I wanted to be until I can land that big job, which, you know, eventually now I've landed a bigger job higher salary, and you know, it's great. But honestly, like, to start off like, you can't expect yourself to be making the six figures expect yourself to make the real the you know, look at where your market is how much the average pay is, I know I'm in the Phoenix Arizona market, that market, the average pays from 60 to 75. For start off with that's average of a developer, if you can get that great. If you get a little bit lower than that, don't be discouraged. Take it and just devote yourself and pick yourself up. Because eventually that next year, you're going to have the recruiters calling and recruiters are gonna be inbox you and you know, your LinkedIn, you're gonna be like, Okay, I got another recruiter call, I got another recruiter call, take the recruiter call, you know, I didn't, I didn't plan on taking a recruiter call for his last job I got, I actually kind of blew them off couple times, and eventually was like, Okay, this person's hitting me up, let me talk to him for a moment, I ended up talking to them and ended up getting a job getting job place with them. So that was great. It was It wasn't expected. I had other plans, I was, you know, building a new portfolio that was about to launch some new new apps on my portfolio. And I was like, doing great. And I'm like, alright, alright, and then it just happened before I even can launch the whole thing. So there's, you know, there's, there's other ways that people will notice when you're working at something, and you're using your GitHub, and then they look at things like that, if you're updating your GitHub and you're pushing to it, and they're seeing all the stuff go in there, they know that you're making the effort, and you're pushing towards it, if you're not using any of those tools that are out there, they're gonna look at you and be like, this person's not really showing any work, you know? Yeah, it's, it's important to when it comes to coding, it's it, I think it's important that you like it, right? Some people can, you know, slog through it, and they'll, they'll hate their life. But I just don't think that's a very, like, we have such a, you know, relatively speaking short time on this earth, you gotta sort of enjoy what you do, right? You do, oh, you got not every day, you're gonna like every project, no, like, that's gonna be something where you're doing something monotonous. You're like, oh, and then working on the front end, and you're just trying to make it a little bit better. And every time you put a code in, it breaks it and you got to keep going back at it. And you you're working on the same thing for a week. And you're like, I hate this. But once you're done with it, you feel success. Gear six, it's a success. And you're just happy. The fact that you actually finished the project, you're like, I move on to the next one. And that's experience you're going to you're going to take with you and be like, Oh, I remember this last time. I took me a week to finish this. I actually, you know, sometimes you you store your code, like what you want, if like, what the problem was, I write everything down. And I'm like, Okay, let me put it this block. So if I have this problem, again, I know exactly where to refer to. And I got a little template for myself to help out. Which is awesome, which is great. You know, it's that's the process right? It's everyone thinks that the I shouldn't say everyone I got it. I'm over generalizing, but there is a common myth, or I don't know how to say, beginners will look to an expert and say, oh my gosh, there's so much better than me, like how am I ever going to achieve that level? Right? And, and that level takes a decade or more to get to when you know, these senior level people who look like who make it look effortless.
14:19
When you when you take them and go back to month one, they're probably gonna look exactly like you and I've said this to some of my students before where where maybe to you too, is you guys are so much better off now. Like at the very beginning and in your careers so much better off than I was when I like I had a I graduated with a university degree right I graduated with this thing that's supposed to be the holy grail of getting you a job and I could not get a job and I once I finally did through a streak of luck and things falling into place I finally was off offered a job And I was terrible at the job. I it was atrocious, my first anyway. So people always go very hard on themselves, right. And it's just you have to be more gentle on yourself because this stuff is extremely difficult to learn. And you guys are in like now with YouTube, and with you know, and learning and boot camps, like I didn't have any of that. And anyway, you guys are so much better off now. And that sort of ties into what I want to talk about next, which is you sound like someone who you just dove right into boot camps. You did one boot camp and then another boot camp and then did a job and blah, blah, why not go the self taught route? Why did you? Or did you try to do it self taught on your own like YouTube and podcasts or blogs? Like, can you talk more about to the reason why I felt the bootcamp I like the experience of having just the mentor who could help me out with things, I have a question I have someone to talk to you when you're doing self taught, you don't have the mentor all you have is like, you know, whatever for me, you hop on your Free Code Camp or, or you hop on for whatever, like your YouTube or anything. And the YouTube was discouraging, because you're watching people on YouTube, and they're building stuff and you're like, I'm never going to get to this level, I'm never going to get to this level, and you're having the same question the same problem over you're like why he'd asked myself the same question. Like, I'm never gonna get there. You know, now I look at YouTube, I look at it differently. And I was like, how much did this person rehearse in order to get this video on there? You know, that's like being a person who puts it up on YouTube. Like, you have to like rehearse if you're not doing it live, or you're seeing all the mess ups. Like you rehearse that, like somehow, you're not just building unless you are the best developer in the world. And you could just develop things that easy. You're gonna make mistakes for every developer, no matter what your level is here. You know, that was one discouraging thing. Like I tried the YouTube I tried to self taught and it just didn't work out. Like as I wanted it to it does, like even today, I still do kind of teach myself certain things. I'll hop on YouTube, watch a video, and I'll build it with them. And I'm like, Okay, I understand what I'm doing wrong now. So it's like, you're not really just the bootcamp gives you a great foundation. It helps you out and gives you those extra questions that you wouldn't be able to ask anybody. I'm the videos that I find on YouTube or videos that I'm like, looking for a specific thing to do. And I need to go find it somewhere on YouTube within somebody's coding video. And I'm like, Okay, well, they're building this, I know, I'm building something similar. And I'm going to look for what I'm doing. And I'm going to patch that together, just like you would go on Stack Overflow, and you're like, Okay, what am I looking for? I need this exact same thing. But you're never gonna get the exact thing you're building, but you need to kind of patch things together to make everything work.
17:33
And that's, I mean, that's, so You took the words on my mouth, it's again, we didn't we didn't rehearse this beforehand. This is you know, so when, when you have the skill set, so yes, you're someone who now has the skill set, right you are, you've been exposed to coding, you have a year or two under your belt, a professional experience. And you can now utilize that skill set that vast amount of knowledge and experience to be able to watch YouTube and listen to a podcast or that and you use it like a scalpel. Right? You go in there. And that's that's exactly that's those. That's what the tools are best used for. When you use them on the brand new beginner side of things and expect to be able to just watch videos. It's like you said it can be demotivating because it's like, Well, wait, I'm not getting this. And you feel like you should be getting it and you get you hear these stories amplified by all these people. You know, I'm a self taught coder, and I got a job for $100,000. And it only took me four months. And it's like, there is so much more to those stories than what you're hearing. Again, I'm generalizing. But I've been doing this for I've been teaching people how to code for 10 years. I haven't seen that unicorn yet. I haven't seen someone who could just go and do it all on their own. Not saying that you can't. It's just it's it takes a lot more than a few months to do it on your own. And yeah, so if you're getting discouraged if you're someone who has been watching YouTube, and you know, trying to do it on your own, and you've been hitting, you know, roadblock after roadblock, and you feel like you don't understand this stuff, and that you'll never get it and everyone smarter than me and like, that's normal. You are 100% normal, but there isn't really, you know, every single person who I can I can say with confidence, every person who has the experience now and who who knows what they're doing. can listen to the words I can say and say oh, yeah, I totally relate. I Yeah. 100% That's true, like, totally relate to it. It's totally So yeah, if you're demotivated and what just know that it's entirely normal. And in my opinion, and obviously, it is a biased opinion. What you need is you need support, you need support from an expert who's been there before who can teach you this stuff, who can, you know, translate it in different ways and watch your face and see how your face is reacting to the information coming out of the mouth and have that teacher you know, say okay, doesn't look like you're getting that you're seeing maybe can I explain it like this and like that's where that's where the work happens. That's where the level ups happen that and all these Working on projects yourself. But anyway, I'm getting I'm getting into the weeds, that might be a good transition to talking Well, how was your experience with the bootcamp that we have here coders campus? All the good, good. It was, it's a great group camp, like, I didn't have a foundation in Java. So Java was a brand new language that I was actually learning and pushing towards. So the Java side kind of like, it was it was harder, because now I had to refocus myself and everything that I learned to take this some stuff, but not everything and push it towards, of course, you know, the language is crossover, and you can't do everything exact same way. It was a great experience, to be honest, like, I felt it, it prepared me more to get a job than my other bootcamp, the like, it was just the other boot camp. Don't get me wrong, it was great. It gave me the great foundation. But what you're looking for is how to get a job in the real life examples of things. And like, like you said, Job is everywhere. Like, you're going to get a job if you learn Java. And that's something for sure. I didn't really have anything bad at the bootcamp, I felt it was great. I honestly, I didn't really the projects were project. Tough. They weren't, they weren't too easy, where, you know, like, my other product with other bootcamp, were pretty easy. Build your frame out and change the color of this, this was more, you're challenging your brain and you're thinking a different way. And you're learning at the same time? And I'm curious, um, this is, you know, I didn't plan to ask this question. I'm just curious to see. And again, don't, I'm not trying to, you know, make you give the flowery and and politically correct. And be honest, truly, with the job that you have. Now, first of all, what's your the title in? Do you have an official title in this new job? Software Developer software development? Yeah. So that's another thing that people get really fixated on is titles. And like, it's one of my first jobs or second job I got, I was called a software engineer. And I was like, Wait, I don't have an engineering degree, like, what you're calling me an engine. And it was like, that's, you know, they throw these words around every
22:04
company, every company I've learned has different titles like software developer, one or software engineer, one, it depends on the company itself, and what they're actually putting. So if you even though it says software engineer, it's, it's different. Like, there's different terms for every company. So don't think like, oh, you can't find an engineering job. If you look at everything on there, and what they're looking for, if you match up with it, apply to it, even though you're not a software engineer, I would say though, on your resume, change it to software engineer match with their matching. So don't just keep it as like, oh, I software developers, you know, make sure you're matching what they're matching. If your skill set matches their skill set, you know, those are things where you have to do you can't just be like, I'm gonna apply to this at this this level, or, you know, I understand I'm, I'm still a junior developer, I'm not a senior developer. I don't call myself a developer, I call myself a software developer. That's what I do. I'm not a junior, I'm a junior, but I'm not a junior. I'm a software developer, I do the job, like, you know, it's not like I'm working to do the job, or I'm still in school. You know, I say, while you're in school, call yourself a junior developer, because you're still learning. You know, as a software developer, you you are a software developer. I agree. So now in terms of your job now, and this is sort of where I'm, I don't know where this question is gonna go. And if it blows up in my face, that's fine. So you're, when you take the experience you got from, from the bootcamp that you did with us with coders campus. The experience you got there? How well did it match up with the job that you're working at now? Is it 80% crossover and 90% 50%? Like, the skills that you need? How close was the match? So it's, it's weird, because, of course, you have the Java bootcamp, they looked at more of my react side of everything, because their application, their front end runs on React, and they look at Android, which I have no experience with Android. So I'm learning Android on the fly as it is right now. They did like that I knew Java because they actually work in C Sharp as well. So I'm learning C sharp, and I'm learning the Android Studio at the same time. So because I knew somewhat of the Java side, they're like, Okay, he can match up towards a C sharp, so it kind of it correlates with certain things, depending on what market you're in. Your lead developer who works on the product, he'll know exactly what what can actually move forward, what they're what they're doing what. So what you're saying is the skill set that you learned in the boot camp, and the fact that I you know, we we go hard on let me teach you this one language that is, you know, not the most easy language and not the most difficult, but it's a little bit on the harder side, the Java language tends to be the harder side, my my thesis and what I base my education off of is let me teach you Java, because it's pretty difficult. And once you know that language pretty well, you can apply it to almost any other language fairly successfully. And I don't again, this could have backfired, but I wanted to see what you said. He just said, Yeah, I use Android, which you didn't learn in the boot camp, and I'm maybe using C sharp which you didn't learn at the boot camp, but now you're getting paid to do that. So that helps to dispel the myth that you absolutely Like, you applied to that job, or maybe they they went to you and your skill set didn't match 100%. Right? Not actually, this job was a recruiter found me for this job, right? I didn't apply to hire you. But they found me because they're like, your skill set matches what we're looking for, like, you know, I know, my boss. Now, what he gives a recruiter with probably skill sets of matching, because when they had my resume printed out, when I walked in for the interview, he's like, these are skill sets. And there's three people sitting in front of me, and I'm, like, nervous, and they're talking about everything. They're like, what are your skill sets? Us? Can you tell me more about your skill set on Java? And they started picking everything out? Oh, you're my, you're my sequel, you know, of all these things, trying to pick it out to know what I knew on that point. You know, I told him I didn't really know C sharp, but I knew Java, I know that Java can relate towards it. So I think I could I could figure it out at that point in time. They're not looking to see if you have you know, everything 100% They want to know if you're willing to figure it out. If you're going to be that person who's like, I don't know this. Right now I have a seizure going into work today, I have a C sharp question. Because they're asking me to update some stuff. And I'm like, I have no clue where this is supposed to go in the code. I've read through everything of understanding what I understand. But it doesn't make sense to me. And that's okay. Because believe it or not even saw, like myself with 15 years of experience happens to me, too. I'll walk into something and I'm like, I have no clue what's going on here. And that's just software development software. But I have my notes that I took yesterday while I was trying to do it. And I'm gonna go in and be like, alright, this is my problem. This is what I need to do. Am I looking at the right thing? And can you point me in the right direction? I don't want the answer. I need you to point me in the right direction or, or tell me I'm doing the right thing. And to get me to get me there. Hey, now, and I want to dive into the actual interview part of this whole thing. Now, I guess this is I was gonna say, how many interviews did you go on before you got the job? But I guess they approached you, right?
26:50
Um, they actually even through the interview process. I actually never got the recruiter call. It was really weird because the recruiters like, I'm setting you up to have a meeting with me, we're gonna talk and the recruiter eventually cancelled the first one because something happened and he was busy with something. I was like, okay, no big deal. He's like, so he rescheduled me, and it said interview and I, I assumed it was with him, the recruiter, but it wasn't actually the recruiter, which was really weird, because like, hop on the phone, I think, as a recruiter, and I've been emailing back and forth. And so I'm really casual dissection of what's going on, you know, just like he's my best friend, because we've been talking for a while. And I didn't realize it was my boss, who is it now that I was talking to him, and I was like, Oh, my God, I'm talking to him right now. And I didn't notice this till like the last two minutes when he said his name again. Because in the beginning of the call, when we first got on, our connection was just really bad. We both introduced ourselves, we didn't realize ourselves, so we're like, oh, and he's asking these questions. I'm talking to him. And then he's like, Well, let me get back to the recruiter. And then we'll, we'll see, we want to do next. I'm like, Oh, my God, what? Oh, yeah, it was it was it was kind of shocking at that point in time. At that time, I was like, I just freaked out because I was too casual. And I wasn't business oriented, you know, that I displayed a little bit more confident because one recruiter it was, it's easier to talk to, you're gonna have more confidence when you're talking to actual interview person, you're going to be nervous, you're sweaty, you're freaking out about everything. That that interview process to me, it was like, just display that for the next interview. I was like display confidence, the same confidence you had just go in there being relaxed, got a little nervous when you have three people come into the room and you're like, ah, snapper three people in here. I'm just gonna be one person. But at the same time they it was it was different because they didn't ask me to pull up my laptop. They didn't ask me all these, you know, leetcode questions or anything, they didn't, they didn't do any of that stuff on this when they wanted to know who I was, what I was doing and what my struggles have been throughout coding, and they want to know if I'm going to be a fit for them. They've already screened me in the beginning, they seen my resume. They they seen I pushed up to GitHub, they they knew I had the other job that I was working on for about a year's time. So they they already know that they want to know who you are, and if you could fit for their company. This isn't like a big company like Google or anything like that. But you know, it's a it's a startup now. So the company called Brooklyn bedding, they actually just merged with helix, which they all make mattresses and they sell them across the world. Brooklyn bedding is a main manufacturer, so they manufacture all the foam and all the coils and everything for beds and either the beds in the box you buy on Amazon or if you go to your Costco or Sam's Club, you have a lot of their stuff in your stores, you'd never even know. So it's it's a big company, and that just merged and even 10 times bigger than the office on East Coast and the West Coast. Now we're teaming up with helix. So it's, it's great to see a company that now I believe like three years ago, they only had like 200 employees now they have over 400 employees. So they've doubled in size and but it's great. They have a brand new facility that they're building out here for everybody and and it's a growing company is a growing startup and yeah, that's really cool. I think it could be great just what they're doing and how they're cornering the market. They have new technology like just on the manufacturing side that no one else is doing right now. So and it's it's interesting because it's like, when I think of a mattress company, I don't think 400 employees and I don't think software developers, right. So you know that that was a weird thing. I was like, yeah, what are they going to do is like, so I took the interview, not knowing I was like, This is gonna be weird, then we'll see what they're having me do. I was like, I don't know if this is really a software job. And it was 100% You know, knew exactly what, what I wanted to do. But you know, it gave me that great experience. That's so good. Yeah, it's just there's so many opportunities out there. And anyway, I don't want to repeat myself with how you know, amazing it is to be a software developer. But there's so many different types of software developers out there work for different companies. It's it's not just your your Google, your Facebook, your your Amazon, there's, there's everything else as a smaller independent market is healthcare. There's a bunch of software developers for them. And like, you know, the market is huge. So no matter what industry you want to go into, it's into the need for it. And you so I forget you say it's a local, or is it a remote or is actually local. So the office is here in Phoenix, Arizona, which I go into the office every day, I can work remote someday, if I want to work remote, I prefer just to go in the office because it's right now starting off new, it just makes it easier for me to ask questions and be around everybody and get to know the team and not the one remote guy who's who's on the other side. That's right, exactly. Cool, man. Now, I had a question teed up here for you know, do you have any advice for aspiring coders, but you already given some pretty darn good advice in terms of all these tips? Is there anything else that you can think of in terms of like, if someone is where you were, I don't know, a year or two ago, they're considering a boot camp? I don't know Is there anything else that you could suggest to them or, you know,
31:38
take a boot camp, I would say take a boot camp, I have nothing about bad about a boot camp. But if you're gonna take a boot camp, be prepared to not get a job right away, but push towards getting that job, you can't just take a bootcamp and expect to get a job, you have to know your stuff. So that means you're going to be putting in a lot of work, putting in a lot of work and a lot of hours, and you're going to make some sacrifices. You know, my social life kind of died at that time, I really have no social life. Now, just because I made that sacrifice few years back. And you know, I'm still every day I wake up, I think about coding, I go to bed, think about coding, you know, you have to do it every day, you have to programming, I think right now is the longest where I'm programming for like 10 hours a day, sometimes because I go to work for eight hours, and I come home and still coming back home and programming for two more hours trying to finish up things. And, you know, eventually I'll figure out my balance. But right now, you'd have to put the work in, if you're going to, if you're going to take a bootcamp, be prepared to put the work in and dedicate yourself to your development, because it's your development. It's not software development, it's your development in software development. That's such like, that's also I don't like, this is a very, what you just said, is a very large piece of this puzzle. I say this a lot, I get on my soapbox and talk about motivation. Everyone is motivated at the beginning. Everyone sees the end goal, and they say, Wow, I can't wait to be a software developer, get a job, be able to, you know, make eventually six figures or whatever, and it's gonna be great. And I'm gonna have flexibility and it's gonna be cool. And, and it's, it's fun, and it is motivating, right? And then they get 30 days into something like a boot camp. And the motivation probably disappears pretty quickly. The reality of the task, and the mountain in front of you, slaps you in the face and shoves you onto the ground. And then you know, anyway, so you need more than motivation. And the word, the terminology I use is dedication, right? There's, there's motivation, and then there's dedication, there's drive, right? And that you're not going to succeed if you don't have that. So I'm glad that you pointed that out. And it's a ton of work. It's a ton of hours, a ton of work. It's very frustrating. But in the end, I don't know, I think it's worth it in the end. But I think it's worth it. Honestly, I ended up there all my development was during COVID two, so like the first year was before COVID, and then COVID hit and then I took the drop, like my, my hourly job at that point in development. So it was like a three year process that I took to dedicate myself COVID started it and I've kept working COVID hit, you know, and it it was downhill at that time. And, you know, a lot of stuff shut down around me and I was like, Okay, well, what can I do right now, while I'm not working? Because of course, we're quarantining everywhere and I took the second boot camp. That's why I found coders campus is it was one of those I found online and like, Okay, this is the online boot camp. Let me try this one out, dedicated my money that I had was like, let me start taking this and, you know, and make my payments and take the bootcamp and I think it was a great experience because during but what else was I gonna be doing during that time? I needed something to keep myself focused. So it was just learning so and now you have a job and are you comfortable sharing the salary that you were offered or you don't have to if you don't want to so? It's not it's not I don't want anybody knowing especially if somebody else you know, I worked with, let's say That's a, you know, if you let's say there's a fallen in the in the average rain for the area. Oh, honey, yeah, honey, there you go. Yeah, so and then average rain. And that's again, I'm rival or Phoenix is supposed to be for that average windows. Exactly. So that's a good good piece to end on is is, you know, set your expectations, it's going to be hard work, you're going to be drive, you're going to be more than motivation, you're going to probably feel like you're, you're going to want to quit, because of how hard it is, Oh, I thought about quitting so many times. But you know, I couldn't quit, I just, there's something about it that just like, I don't like to fail at something that I'm putting my heart towards. And to me, that's my dedication, you know, I always tell myself, I will, I can't, I must, which is my little three things, I will do this because I can do this. And I must do this because I want to do this, you know. And if you keep yourself in a motivation, where you have your own motivational speeches, you know, every day is not going to be perfect. There's some times I'm like, I don't want to have my computer today. I can't touch it. I can't touch it. I'm just my brains fried, you know, and there's days you're like that and other days you hit you touch your computer, and you're the best you seem like you're the best coder ever. Everything comes to you naturally. And then you have your roadblock. So you have to just dedicate yourself towards it. Then the big the big thing. I love it. Yeah, cuz like anything. I mean, it's not there's not unique to coding, there are plenty of other careers and professions where it's gonna be hard ladies and gentlemen. So you gotta you gotta have you got to like it. I think, you know, you got to have a curiosity, you got to have something there above just motivation at the beginning. So anyway, easy, everybody be making $100,000 a year six figures if it was easy, but everybody's not making that because it's not that easy. You just got to dedicate yourself.
36:35
I would say everybody that's a coder, once they hit, you know, five or so years. And I think six figures is very likely once you're above five years in. That's my 1000. That's my goal. Right? There is like getting to that point five years in, this is why I want to make so yeah, I'm, I'm there. I'm pushing it. So yeah, I think you'll get there typically, from what we see is we see about a $10,000 a year increase. For every year that you're doing development work, you tend to see about 10k and then eventually that levels off. So you can't you know, it's not like you're getting making 150,000 more than the average, if you have 15 years experience, no, eventually it caps off. But yeah, that's what we're sort of what we're seeing is between 10 to maybe 15,000 is the average raise per year. So it's just good data for you to know and understand once you want to get going. So don't just focus on the first job and the first salary for the first year, because that's only one year of your career, right. So because I say take the first job, whatever you get just right here, you're going to be a fit and make sure you're ready to learn. You're not you might not be building everything you want to build, you might just be doing the monotonous tasks, but just just do it, just do it and you're in, you're in it, you're gonna still be doing your own developer on the side, your own projects still, but just take the job and get the experience of actual working in the industry. So good. I think that's good. I think we get in there unless there's anything else you has. No, that's it but wonderful. So thank you yes scene for sharing your your honest feedback on the journey. And yeah, hopefully we as coders campus now, my my marketing message to you, without any hype is yeah, if you've seen message sort of resonates with you, if you can see yourself in him, maybe you might be a good fit. So I don't know, wherever this video is, there's probably some way to take the next action like clicking on a button to talk to one of our admissions advisors, or clicking on a button to apply or whatever go for it doesn't cost you anything, you can dip your toes in those waters and see if you might be a good fit, because you might be a better fit, then you give yourself credit for as I've seen with many students in the past. So thank you guys, for being with us and sharing your time. And hopefully Yeah, we'll get an update at some point in the future. Perfect. Yeah, thank you.
38:49
Thanks for listening to this episode of the coders campus podcast. But before you go, Trevor has a favorite ask you. In order to keep these episodes free, he'd love for you to leave a rating and review the podcast on iTunes. Just go to coderscampus.com/review to leave your own rating and review of the show. So if you have 30 seconds to spare right now, please help out by leaving a rating and review via coderscampus.com/rubio It will ensure that you continue to get these awesome free podcast episodes each and every week. So if you like free swag, head on over to coderscampus.com/review Happy Learning

The post EP57 – From Restaurant Manager to Software Developer appeared first on Coders Campus.
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Learn how to program using the Java programming language. This podcast will teach you step by step how to use the Java programming language to create your own applications or web applications! These…

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