Today, I have been accepted into Coder Camps, which is a full stack web development coding boot camp. I am very excited to get started and it has been a long journey following my interests with some detours along the way to get here.
My story begins back in the early 1980's when I was a child my father gave me a hand me down computer. It was an Atari 400 and I admittedly used it mostly for video games, like Pac Man and Missile Command. I did however do some programming in BASIC following a book my father gave me, but like most kids I was easily distracted. When I was at the computer it was mostly eating power pellets being chased by a couple of ghosts while playing Pac Man. While computers remained an important part in my life and I continued to use them and learn more programming was something I was not able to concentrate on fully back then.
My next experience with programming came in High School where I took two courses in PASCAL and enjoyed it very much, however I would soon discover girls and eventually in senior year I fell in love and by the time I had graduated all I wanted to do was spend more time with her. So programming would be put on the back burner once more and I pursed my interest in mechanical things becoming an apprentice auto technician. I did enjoy learning the how the mechanical world worked and always was the person who took things apart to figure them out and fix them if I could. Without getting to far off topic I hit a point where I wanted to learn more about how electronics and computers worked from a hardware and software perspective.
So I came back to the world my father had introduced me to many years earlier and took up work fixing computers and small networks. I quickly identified that while I was quite good at the job I was doing I want to deal more with the internals of how a computer worked and electronic theory so I enrolled in college. While in college my studies combined mechanical, electrical, computers and industrial automation. I earned my Associates Degree in Maintenance Electricity on June, 3 2014 and continued working while looking for a job as an Electro-Mechanical Technician in my area. At this point I had studied programming in what is known as ladder logic which is used for programming (PLC's) Programmable Logic Controllers. A PLC is most simply an industrial grade computer capable of being programmed and withstanding extreme environments.
I quickly learned that finding a job in my area within this field can be challenging because there is a lot of competition. I had also learned that traditional programming particularly in .NET was an important part of integrating and controlling large networks of automated equipment and the databases they rely on. At this point I considered transferring my Associates Degree into a local college for a BS in Information Systems as most of my credits were transferable either directly or by elective. It was at this time I learned of coding boot camps while reading one of the many emails I get daily related to IT. I looked into coding boot camps and thought this was the great opportunity for someone like myself. I had a substantial background in computers yet wanted to hone my programming skills which would make me a particularly valuable person in job market.
This is where Coder Camps stood out to me as it offered a curriculum based on .NET which will help me as an aspiring Microsoft Store Developer and dabbling in Web Development. More importantly it builds upon the education I received in the last two years as .NET is used by many systems integrators to tie everything together. Form the database to the PLC's connected to field devices like proximity sensors collecting data from equipment in the real world weather it's something as simple as temperature readings in coolers to something as complex as robots building car's in an automotive factory. C#, JavaScript, VB and Microsoft SQL server are commonplace in this world and I learned from job searches and interviews. People in this field of engineering weather a technician like myself or an engineer are in high demand if they knew things like C# and Microsoft SQL. So here I am at Coder Camps and I can't wait to see where this all leads a few months and years down the road.
