Week 50!

Published April 27, 2021 in Journal Entries.

O boy, it’s been that long already?

Checkins

This week and last week, I checked in with some of my “mentors” to get a sense of how I’m coming along and what I need to be doing next. Looks like I’m fairly on track with most of my goals.

One thing that did come to the fore is some of the challenges I will face as a self-trained web developer. One of the biggies is appearing credible without a college or bootcamp on my resume. Some of the things I’m planning to do in order to try to overcome that challenge:

Finish up my portfolio site and start listing my projects
Rework my LinkedIn presence to reflect my new career direction
Try to line up some freelance work, possibly under another company in order to show that others trust me with paying work (some of that is in the works already…)
Clean up my GitHub, making sure to leave the best projects, clean them up and write a ReadMe for each of them

Why not a bootcamp?

The idea of a bootcamp came up again as a possible way to fast-track the process. The obvious advantages are the interviews that you get to do, the career coaching, the connections, etc.

I was a bit taken aback since I had already considered that and decided not to go that route. Why would I consider it now? I should have just done that from the beginning.

After going back to some of the bootcamps’ websites and reminding myself what is involved, I remember now why that wasn’t really a viable option.

The big thing is that they really expect you to be able to drop everything and dedicate yourself full-time (some of them expect your evenings too). That makes perfect sense given the “bootcamp” analogy and model.

However, as a father of two small kids with a wife who works and other existing commitments and demands on my time–during a pandemic when one child is in and out of school dependent on the winds of lockdown–and limited access to childcare…

I just don’t see how we could have made it work.

I’m confident of my ability to learn what I need to learn on my own. The challenge will be to convince employers that I can be a useful addition to their team.