Heading to Houston

Well it's official, I'm heading to Houston at the end of March to take part in Coder Camps. Twelve weeks later I'll be hunting for my first junior developer job.

Deciding which school to attend was a challenging proposition. First, if you don't know what I've been up to the last month or so, I've been researching and preparing to attend a code boot camp.  A what? It's a full-time 8-16 week experience where you focus on nothing but acquiring and practicing the skills needed to become a web developer.

I started by looking up every program I could find across the country. In the end I had a list of my top twelve programs, spread out from Seattle to San Francisco, to New York.  I changed my mind on which program was my "top choice" repeatedly. Repeatedly.  There's a good chance I'll find my first job in the same place I go to school, so location and cost of living were factors, then there was length of program, start date, cost of tuition, and curriculum, including which languages and frameworks would be taught. This school boasts great job placement outcomes, that school has awesome job fairs...I kept notes in a lengthy spreadsheet.

While most schools teach Ruby on Rails a few teach .Net / C# instead (virtually all camps include Javascript). For anyone lost again, these things, "Ruby" and ".Net", are tools used for building websites.  Ruby is a language gaining in popularity and is often the choice of start ups. C# is popular with large businesses and corporations. My research shows there are more C# jobs than Ruby in the Portland area, but it varies from region to region.

I applied to the top programs on my list, went through interviews, tests - both logic and coding, technical interviews, and even answer the question "What's the most challenging thing you've ever done?" Then it came time to make the tough choice.  In the end Coder Camps won out due to a combination of factors not the least of which were an impressive record of post-graduation job placement, focus on .Net, and Houston's very reasonable cost of living.

One little perk to finally knowing where I'm going is that I can, for now, cross Ruby and Rails off my List of Things to Learn About Today. Now its down to just C#, .Net, Javascript, HTML, CSS, SCSS, GitHub, Command Line, and... the list goes on.

Still, the 5 days or so I've focused heavily on strengthening my CSS skills mainly because I just didn't want to invest a ton of time into C# or Ruby only to later attend a school that taught the other. Now I can safely dive back into C#.

So I've got that going for me, which is nice.