Well hot damn, that was a hell of a first week at Origin Code Academy. As one of the students with some previous experience, I became the unofficial teaching assistant. I finally know what my old CTO felt like whenever I pestered him on Glip. My classmates made my brain sweat and commuting 6.5 miles round trip by bike made the rest of me sweat.
So here's my first week in review:
Most everyone is worrying their ass off about how out of their depth they feel. Some students got very emotional about that issue and felt like they wouldn't be able to keep up. Another cohort is in progress with us, though they're eight weeks ahead. One of those students let us know that he had quit a well playing job to enroll in Origin and he had a family and kids. We also saw a video of previous graduates self evaluations of their first week and they all sounded like us (I don't understand this, the first assignment was hard, how will I be able to cope?, etc), which was reassuring.
The biggest thing that helped us through is that the class is very supportive of each other. There's 20 of us, which is kind of big for a coding bootcamp. But that also means there's someone to go to at almost any time. I've asked for help from classmates fresh to coding and received great solutions that probably would've taken me hours. My takeaway:
Coding is collaborative
I did come across some curveballs myself. I'm used to grabbing data and displaying it on a page with little manipulation on the client-side. Even assignments such as a change calculator (telling the user how many quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies to give in exact change) stumped me. So there's always something new for us to learn. Next week will put me squarely into newbie territory as we're covering Angular.js, and that is a big scary monolith to me. Check in next week to see how full of stars it is.