How Fullstack Academy Turned Me Into A Programmer

Before I first started the Fullstack Academy curriculum I would have considered myself a hobbyist programmer. In my spare time, I would play around with Arduinos and make fun projects with simple code, and I always had been fascinated with computers and loved learning about technology, but my knowledge never extended beyond what I could learn in an hour long documentary on any particular subject. But nevertheless, computer programming has always been something I’ve always been interested in. Though I never saw it as a career path because I never thought I could break into it by teaching myself and have someone pay me for it.

When I started at Fullstack Academy I was excited and ready to learn. From the first day forward I gave all the effort I could because I knew that the learning pace moved fast and the program was going to be over before I knew it. So I wanted to get the most out of the experience and have no regrets. In addition to programming, Fullstack also does a great job with career services and getting students ready to start applying for jobs as soon as the program is over. 

Everything sounded good during orientation on the first day, but two weeks into the program I started to worry whether or not I would be ready for a job interview in a couple months. I worried I would not have been able to say with a straight face to any employer that they should hire me. But one of the mottos at Fullstack is to “trust the process”. This is a philosophy I embraced partly because I didn’t have any other choice. 

In addition to trusting the process, Fullstack hires a couple recent grads of each cohort to become teaching fellows for the next cohort. These people were examples of the process and were a great source of reassurance that I too was able to cross the divide from hobbyist to professional programmer.

Now I am working on the capstone project with three other students and the whole program will come to an end very soon, but I am not worried about a job interview, I am actually excited. I have the confidence now to tell any employer that they should hire me because I have the skills and most importantly, the ability to learn programming concepts. 

During the second half of the program, we were tasked with three very different projects and they are where everything came together and clicked for me. In addition to building three web apps from scratch using every tool we learned during the first half of the program, we also had to introduce new concepts that we had to research on our own. Now I have a strong confidence in my ability to be a good teammate for any project involving programming. What I know now that I didn’t know two weeks in, is that if I’m given a day or two, I will be able to learn any technology whether its a node library or an API, and I will be able to utilize it.

Now when I read the documentation of a new node library for the first time, I don’t get lost in the text. I can quickly figure out what its doing and decide whether or not it will be useful for my project or if I’ll save it for later on a future project.

What seemed like a bombardment of new concepts everyday during the first half of the program was actually an orchestrated exposure to the essential concepts and libraries needed to build a fullstack web app. I didn’t need to know the concepts like the back of my hand at the time because during the second half of the Fullstack Academy program I was able to prove to myself that I could find the answers to the questions I did not know because Fullstack Academy taught me how to work like a programmer.