I made the letters in the picture Greek characters for a reason. You know the saying, "It's all Greek to me!" Well... having learned Greek, that doesn't exactly apply to my situation anymore.... but the meaning of the saying still applies! Plus, it's call "Lambda" School, so...
My hobbies have included 3D modeling, texture work, making memes, and.... programming at a "getting lost" kind of level. I dabbled in GameMaker Studio long enough to make a procedurally generated maze game. I built small games in Unity 3D from zombie themed mazes to a virtual reality metal detector simulator. I began using Amazon Lumberyard, and as I started delving into learning LUA, and how to apply that code to make magic happen... I realized how truly lost I was. I was following a tutorial on Udemy by Ben Tristem, and it is an excellent tutorial. But it's made for Unity, not Lumberyard. As I tried to custom write some scripts to get the camera to follow my character, I kept bashing my head against communication buses (it's a Lumberyard thing), and C++ commands to get things started. I realized that I didn't know coding half as well as I should. At this point in my life, I had a huge gap in my employment status due to "life", and I couldn't get employers to take me seriously. I needed something to boost my "hirability". I enjoy programming. So why not find a way to make something I enjoy, a reason to hire me? I had been getting advertisements in my social media feed about this certain school... So I took a look. Lambda School. I don't have to pay them a penny if I don't find a job making at least $50,000 a year? You have my attention.
So I looked into Lambda School a bit more, and they were just starting their mini programming boot camps. These are two week-long boot camps that teach the basics of JavaScript, CSS, and some other basic programming concepts. They are enough to get your feet wet, and see if you enjoy it. Well... I already knew this much, and already knew that I enjoyed it. I finished their boot camp, which also served as an entry exam for their full time course. So I thought, "I've gotten this far... I'm getting a hip replacement in April, so I can't get a job right now. I might as well give it a shot." Now mind you... I got my hip replaced during the week of learning Redux, which was probably the worst time I could have scheduled it imaginable.... but I completed six and a half months of a flurry of programming course work. Now... picture this...
Git, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, Node, NPM, React, Redux, Front End, Back End, Express, Mongoose/MongoDB, REST, CRUD, Heroku, Authentication, JWT tokens, Sessions, JEST testing, Computer Science, Algorithms, Data Structures, Python, C, CPU simulation, and building a web application from SCRATCH! *pant pant* Okay, take a deep breath...
Now... imagine doing that with 3 extremely vivacious little children, that are 6, 5, and 1 years old, constantly hollering for daddy, snacks, story time, Nintendo, going to the park, lunch, dinner, walks, bike riding, tickling, homework, not feeling good, getting sick and throwing up, getting on the school bus, getting off the school bus, having fights, sneaking food upstairs, writing on the walls, painting with peanut butter... whew... this list can go on and on and on....
Let's just say that the last six and a half months have been extremely rough, okay?
But you know what? I did it. On September 20th, 2018, I officially graduated from Lambda School as a Full Stack Web Developer. My resume has been updated, my blog is getting a new article, and I have a career services department that doesn't get paid unless I get a job!
I'm feeling pretty positive about this. Before Lambda School, I built a website for a church based on a Joomla template. It's absolutely horrid. It's slow, they can't put more than 19 sermons in a single series, and the member page is completely buggy. Now that I understand web development a whole lot more, it's time to correct that mistake. They're getting a completely customized website, with member area, sermon hosting, and Bible study app.
Oooh... speaking of which. It's time to get back to work on it!
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