[divmain]

I attended Code Fellows in October-December of 2013. I had held a handful of tech-heavy positions prior to that time, but had never worked as a software engineer/developer.

I originally saw three primary benefits to attending bootcamp, and I think they're still relevant:

1. It gave me some credibility. Before bootcamp, I had worked with children overseas for a couple of years, and as a care provider the year before that. I had considerable tech experience further back, but nothing related to software development. My resume would have been easy to discard without some way to get connected with employers.

2. It enhanced my motivation. I was paying a lot of money out of pocket, so it placed pressure on me to follow through. I also enjoy working with people, and the classroom setting exceeded self-study in a number of ways.

3. It provided people I could go to when I was stuck. This only happened a half dozen times over the course of the program, but any one of these times might've derailed my interest or motivation.

Overall, my experience was very positive and I was offered a position at Formidable Labs (now just Formidable) before graduating.

It has gone rather well since then. I started as a junior engineer on their Walmart project and progressed to a senior position on my team within the year. A few months in, I received a ~30% raise.

From there, I joined the Walmart Core Web team. That involved building foundational libraries, components, and patterns for the rest of the web teams, as well as a lot of broad architectural work. After a couple of months on that team and some significant successes, I took on additional responsibility, which coincided with another ~35% raise.

Since then, I've worked on Formidable projects for Microsoft and Starbucks, in senior and lead roles. Starting Monday, I'm joining the Edge browser team at Microsoft as a program manager.

Its hard to know what I should attribute my success to - I definitely went into bootcamp with the intention to make the most of every opportunity that came my way, and I continued in that mindset afterwards. I jumped at every chance to learn something new, and spent considerable amounts of time outside of work learning and doing OSS. A few of my projects [0][1][2] got relatively popular (others, not so much [3][4]). All of these were side projects that I pursued independantly, and I think that increased my desireability as a team member. A lot of it was probably timing and luck too!

It's worth noting, however, that my experience was atypical and not in line with the rest of my cohort. I know at least a handful that struggled to find positions.

[0] github.com/divmain/GitSavvy [1] github.com/FormidableLabs/rapscallion [2] github.com/FormidableLabs/freactal [3] interlockjs.com [4] github.com/divmain/recollect