A Journey to Code School (Part One)

Hello there, this is part one of a multi part series talking about my journey through code school. I will be posting additional parts every Wednesday. I hope you enjoy, Part One: A Journey to Code School.

My name is Ryan Jones. I graduated from a code school in August of 2017. The code school lasted for 6 months and was 40 hours a week of learning, coding, and building projects. The code school I went to was called, Epicodus. I loved being at Epicodus because everyday I was being challenged and constantly pushing into the unknown.

My journey to code school started on a regular weekday in Texas. I had already started to get the itch to be a developer from shows like Silicon Valley and Mr. Robot. At this point, I was only a sophomore in college at 21. I was dreaming about working in Silicon Valley and funny enough I wanted to actually work on the Pied Piper team or more accurately I wanted to be Richard.

As crazy as that sounds, I remember a phone call I had with my Mom after I had applied for Epicodus. It was something along the lines of, "Mom, this is how I get a job at Google, Facebook, or Amazon". I told her I would figure out the cost, which for me was an ungodly amount of money. At the time I was only making minimum wage and coming up with 6k+ dollars to attend a code school for six months was risky. However, I've always been the type of person to push every single chip in when I believed it was required.

So I packed a single backpack. Left all my belongings, my car, and my job behind. I boarded a plane to take me to Portland, Oregon with two sets of clothes and my laptop. I took Epicodus extremely seriously, because I knew that I needed to work like hell to accomplish what I set out too. My life for those six months was completely focused on programming. On the commute in the morning and the commute back at night, on the weekend, and once I got home at night I continued to work.

Now the question some people reading may have. How did I come up with the money? Well, to be able to pay the bills I had to take out max student loans and to take out max student loans I had to hold full time college. I did this for the entire six months I was at Epicodus. However, at the beginning it still wasn't enough.

So on Friday nights immediately after programming for 8 hours I would head to a company by the airport to do data entry until midnight. Then I would wake up on Saturday at 9am and do all of my homework for my three classes for college. At 5pm, on Saturday and Sunday I would head out to do data entry until midnight again. Sunday was difficult, I had to be up at 6am to be downtown by 8am for Epicodus, which left me with only a couple hours of sleep.

Meaning Mondays were really tough and looking back this 70+ hour schedule included around 16 hours of commuting during the week using public transportation. This helped build up my mental endurance and when more payments were required during the middle of Epicodus. I kept myself from falling off the wagon and potentially taking the 'easy' way out (quitting). I had to borrow from family members and pay them back with student loans, but even that wasn't enough. About half way through Epicodus, I had a choice. Either I quit or sell my car to make the next payment. So I sold my car, the last piece of value I had.

See I was committed, so committed I would sleep at Epicodus at night because I needed to keep working and the commute would cut into my outside development. Around this time, I began packing a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant everyday in my backpack. I would sleep on the couch and get up before any other students or staff arrived. A couple of students would sleep at Epicodus during group week projects due to working late, but I did this on a regular Tuesday or Wednesday (haha). Still makes me smile a bit looking back.

Fast forwarding towards the end of Epicodus, I formed a team to take on building an Alexa skill for the Javascript group week project. This was the ultimate challenge as it was a completely new set of tools and I was working with NodeJS and AWS. Well, it didn't go so smoothly. Which mostly falls on me for not doing enough to inspire my team. When something is truly new, meaning you have no idea how to start. It's a bit difficult to lead three others due to the majority of time being spent trying to a) understand yourself and b) reading documentation.

However, I tried my best and I prepared over the weekend for Monday so we could hit the ground running. All though on Monday morning, I was the only person who was ready to work. Some team members showed up, but they were slightly behind in the course. Which is totally understandable as we were starting to get quite deep in Angular by this point. However, Monday turned into Tuesday and Tuesday into Wednesday. This is where the lack of team members was really weighing on me.

Luckily, on Thursday everyone showed up. Thursday was also the same day we were going to present, but I had stayed late and worked like hell to get something working so having the extra help was great. By 10am on Thursday, Alexa spoke *gasp*. I think I skipped around downtown for an entire hour after that, I was so stoked that I couldn't even eat lunch.

These moments are what I live for. The feeling of absolute euphoria when you overcome a challenge. I've had so many moments like this with programming. Alexa was different though, the code talked back to me. How cool is that!?

At 3pm, we started the presentations for our group week projects. For my team, we had an actual Amazon Echo on the table. The Alexa skill that we built was for train commuters in the Portland area. By simply asking Alexa, "When will the next green line to Clackamas arrive?". Alexa would give you accurate arrival information. We built it out to work for all Trimet train lines. So when the presentation started, I tried to speak the phrase above and was met with an error response. Yes, as I’m sure you can imagine I was panicking.

Immediately, I did the logical thing which was checking the logs to see what went wrong. While I was doing this however, there was about 35 people standing behind me waiting to see our demo. A team member, then tried to ask Alexa again for arrival information and it worked!

When Alexa responded, I felt the biggest feeling of accomplishment rush through me. It was a week long of challenges and roadblocks, but it came together!

I love telling this story, especially in interviews because every time I talk about it I can’t really stop from smiling. My passion for programming comes to light. Plus it was a really awesome result.

This is the end of Part One: A Journey to Code School. Check back next week for Part Two. See you then and have a great week!