Day one and Christmas Morning

It felt like being an 8 year old on Christmas morning this morning. Too excited to sleep but I wasn’t allowed to get up yet…Well ok, I have 2 kids and 2 dogs to look after so of course I could get up before my alarm and get on with my day but… my Codeclan course didn’t start until 9.30 - it felt like I would have to wait forever to open my presents.. I mean see my classmates!


To give you a bit of background, I embarked on this journey in March 2020. I had previously had a career but for the past 5 years I have been mostly a full time mum (to my two kids and also two hairy babies!) interspersed with ‘bits and pieces’ jobs while I tried to figure out “what I want to be when I grown up!’ My partner works in the IT industry so I hear a bit about “our developers are doing this or that” from him and it got me thinking…

firstly,

this sounds pretty interesting and

secondly..


I think I could do that?!


So I decided to interrogate him for more information….how would one go about getting a job as a developer then?


Enter Codeclan!


It turns out that my other half works for one of Codeclan's partner agencies and they recruit most (if not all) of their junior developers from Codeclan's graduates. Simples, I just need to get myself a space on a Professional Software Developing course and hopefully be good enough to impress potential employers, a lot of whom I will have access to thanks to Codeclan's industry partnerships.


For those who haven’t heard of Codeclan, they are an industry-led digital skills academy, set up to help bridge the digital skills gap in Scotland. They just celebrated their 5th birthday and have had over 1000 students graduate!


So off I set researching Codeclan and researching how to learn to code! I got myself on CodeCademy.com - they have lots of free courses to give you an intro into the world of coding and I began to test the water and find my feet. At first everything was double dutch, but with lots of perseverance and even more google searches the waters started to clear. To seal the deal that this was the route I wanted to follow, was the feeling that you get when you write some code …and it works!!!!

Day two and making friends!

Remote learning, well this is certainly different to what I have been used to in my previous educational experiences! Being hooked up to a video link for the whole day is pretty tiring and also very artificial! It’s hard to get a measure of everyone’s personality at the moment, however at break we had a glimpse into each others lives when we all came back before the lesson began and had…a conversation! Ridiculous to be so pleased about this I know but honestly, it has made all the difference. We’re getting to know each others likes and hobbies and that will make us bond as a cohort and will ultimately help us all on this journey. If we identify with each other we will learn better and support each other, and I am sure that we are all going to need that at some point during this 16 weeks! Cohort E44 - we got this!

Well homework #2 has just been submitted, these are long days, but I find that breaking for tea with my family and walking the dogs down the beach before I embark on the homework task is really helping ‘reset’ my head. I get the chance to consolidate what we’ve learned by recapping

the highlights to my partner (okay if you spoke to him he’d tell you it was WAAAAAYYYYYY more than just ‘highlight’! But to his credit he hasn’t yawned once - yet ;-)


I am so glad that I did the preparation I did before applying to CodeClan. There are so many terminologies to learn, learning how to use your Mac properly before you even get to laying down a line of code! Then there was CodeClan, they are just amazing. They run code along sessions (Professional Software Development taster sessions) which I would highly recommend attending if you are at all interested in finding out more. They are just brimming with information! And trust me, you might be nervous at the beginning (I was - I really, really didn’t want to make a fool of myself!) But by the end you will have had such a confidence boost that you’ll be emailing your application in there and then!


In order to ‘break myself in gently’ to this whole digital learning I also attended a few webinars put on by CodeClan. These are a great way of connecting with people and gleaning an insight into the Industry whilst still remaining anonymous (no video camera - yay!) I have connected with several lovely people on LinkedIn following these webinars and the support network there is just great. I have worked in Industries before where you can’t show “weakness” - I am loving the supportive nature of the Tech Industry and the whole collaborative working - it’s not just everyone for themselves!

Day 3 and Functions 

Thankfully I had done a bit of work on these prior to starting with Codeclan because the first example of functions was looping through a list of dictionaries - not for the faint hearted!! It’s amazing listening to how everyone’s brains work so differently in how they interpret and store information, I am loving it and it makes me really excited for the paired programming which we have coming up later on.


Agile methodology - we are really seeing this come into it’s own now, it’s so good to start each day with a wee check in (formally known as a stand up) as to how everyone is doing and what obstacles they may have come up against.


Whoah!! First paired programming session, CodeClan this is one hell of a ride!! Thrown in at the deep end, live-sharing my VS code screen. Realising after writing all the code that I had saved the directory in the wrong place - having to shuffle everything about before I initialise a git repository. Phew! Thankfully I was paired with Mark who was very patient every time I ran our code and it didn’t work - no we didn’t have any bugs - I had forgotten to press save - oops! So lovely to be getting to speak to people one on one and getting to know them a bit better. What a high when the code runs but honestly, my brain is feeling slightly frazzled now!

Day 4 & 5 and The Social

So I’ll be honest, the rest of the week is a bit of a blur! More practice on functions, a fantastic online Social, organised by the Codeclan staff for us, on the Thursday evening (the one evening of the week with no set homework). This was a great opportunity to get to know each other better and also pick the brains of some of the other students who are 6 or so weeks ahead of us.


Then it was Friday - recap day. I have to say I really appreciated the pace of this day, taking time to make sure we had things straight in our heads before we embarked on the..(death march toll please)… weekend homework!