Erics journey to Development and programming

Dec 12th, 2017      About a year ago I started this blog to track my progress, and looking back at how far I've come, its has been quite the journey for me from Dec 2016 - Dec 2017. 1 year has just past by and everything has just happened so quickly!. It feels like just yesterday I got accepted into Lambda School, at that moment I started seeing stars. The feeling that I finally found the school for me was extraordinary and exhilarating, I was so eager to start working and learn about the thing I love the most, software!.    Around the moment of August and the day I was first accepted I was already working on the pre-course work. My parents were disappointed that I had dropped out of college and disagreed with my thoughts that the traditional system is starting to become outdated, and my thoughts on traditional system have not changed since then. The moment I got kicked out of college I had just discovered what I wanted to study all along and that was computer science. Messing

Nov 7th, 2017       Couple of days after my big day at the Google dev festival, I come back strong with a slight experience of talking to other professional developers and getting to know the field more. When the day started for us, we just finished our intro to the CS course of lambda school. I was very familiar with he architecture so nothing was really new to me except for the protocols being explained a little more thorough. We finished the lectures of the intro to CS and the architecture, now it was time to move onto C programming, and boy oh boy were we in for a wild ride.   The moment we jumped into C programming, we all looked pretty puzzled throughout and it wasnt getting any easier for us. This is probably the hardest thing  I've done here yet and C programming is not a forgiving language to grasp. The objective wasn't just to learn C but the abilities to grasp another language quickly like we were javascript. This is a very difficult task for C programming because

Nov 4th, 2017    10AM:        We first started off the day with a keynote speaker talking about being a developer for 21 years. Seeing him in his shoes and learning to adapt to different technologies developing over the years, must be pretty hard to get used to, he explained that the process can get difficult to get used to but with a bit of trusting the process, he got used to it. As of now I am prepping up for my first code lab learning about the Ionic framework, which is the equivalent to react native for angular. I was able to meet with two very well experienced developers and it is surprised to my knowledge that there are different types of platforms that developers stand on for development. There was one developer I have met and he told me that he developed on .Net, which is really interesting. Also  met another presenter who is a developer for kotlin, who came all the way from France!. So as of now, it is a great start and I'll keep an up to date time update on what I d

Oct 31, 2017: Halloween    It's Halloween today, and today, I'm just planning to code the entire day completely. The whole holiday spirit of halloween, going to parties and trick or treating is currently not in my cycle anymore, although it is still fun to dress up as a character. So far we have completed the break week of lambda school for cohort 2, and this time around we will be starting the CS course of the school.   We just got a taste of it just yesterday and some of the things looked a lot familiar to me just because of the fact that I have built multiple gaming pcs in the past. Even when I was little, my older brother and I would make a computer from scratch. It was really fun to start learning of the architecture of the computer and it is compromised of. We started off learning about transistors and logic gates which was really fascinating. As for the project for this sprint, we are required to write a core of a cpu to support the following instructions. #inputfile 00

Oct, 26th 2017      So just recently we got released to work on our personal projects for the cohort. I have been working constantly and thinking hard on what I wanted to do for my personal project. I remember stating that I wanted to do 5 projects, well the number of things that I wanted to accomplish in order to have a good portfolio was impossible so, I decided to just make 2 projects instead of 5 being a hard number to reach in the amount of time that we had. I decided to make a taxi booking application for my react-native side of things and a website for finding marvel comic books with the marvel api.    I have gotten so much done in the shortest amount of time for the project and it is turning out really well. I used a good amount of packages and dependencies to make the projects work in the ways that I would want it to. I learned also on how to implement redux into react-native as well, instead of the typical ways of returning the actions in the action creator I used redux thunk

Oct 18th, 2017      Here we are, top of the mountain final stretch. We just got done with our devops, despite the fact of me not liking devops at all, we have finally reached the top of hill and about to embark our journey way done. So one of the things we are required to do next is called a personal project, the project doesn't have to have everything that we have learned up to the point, but we are required to make it a fullstack project. There's a list of projects thats flowing through my head by one of the top projects that I have always wanted to make, that includes making a project using the ibm watson api or something with the marvel api. Whatever it is that I'm going to make, I'm going to try to make the accomplishment of making 5 personal projects.   It seemed as if there was a lot going on with the instructors and the relationship of cs2. My cohort can be very intimidating as most of us are pretty skilled at this. So I"m going to have to do my best thes

Oct 16th, 2017     For the past couple of months, I've been dealing with so much with lambda school. To making new friends, to accomplishing coding challenges, to having social interaction with instructors, and to dealing with depression/working under stress. Towards the beginning, this school is starting to change my life and these were the points that I wanted to make as a college dropout. I wanted to show those who have doubted me that you can make it without the worth of an expensive piece of paper. It shouldn't and should NOT let it define you, as I pin pointed out from my last blogs, my objective is similar to lambdas and thats to prove that a an underprivileged like myself can make it . Oct 16th 2017, Update:     Just got off the phone with tai one of our instructors for lambda school. Earlier, I decided to ask him a serious question and this was it, "Out of all the things you've been through, especially going through lambda school, would you do it again? and do

Oct 9th, 2017    With so much that is going on, I notice a lot of things since the start of the program. My skills as a programmer are improving everyday, and its remarkable how much I have improved within just 3 months. The best part is, we're not even finished yet. By the time I write this post we would've reached the react native course which is close to being done with the full-stack javascript section of the school, afterwards we have our introduction to C/C++ programming which is majority of the time employers want. Reasons as to why they would want this so much is because of the fact that you have a good/basic understanding of what goes on under the hood.   So theres a couple of things that I noticed right when I first started the program, first thing was my ability now to tackle coding challenge problems, at the start being able to start a coding challenge problem was difficult for me, but after repetitive reps and constant thinking; my skills for solving these chall

October 2nd, 2017     For some of the new students that are about to embark on a course that is brutally difficult and hard to keep up with, realize this. For some of us, we may think that pretty much our skills are up to par with the professional industry due to the self-learning route and that we would have a breeze not only in the course but also in the environment. Sadly that is not the case, in order to become a good programmer and developer you must first admit to the fact that you do not know everything, and that there is much to be worked on; not only that but the willingness to learn. With the all the technology that is surrounding us, it is always improving every single day of our lives. We must admit that technology and also computer science can go so into depth, it is impossible to know everything that there is in computer science because there is no skill cap.   These are some of my weaknesses that I will go over, and continue to study upon during the weekends of free

   Sept 28th, 2017       We are getting ready to close our 2nd month and just about to move into our 3rd month of the course. For the new students that are reading this blog, keep in mind that this course is brutally, excruciatingly difficult. If you know for a fact that this is what you want to do and willing to sacrifice a lot of free time, then apply. At the start of the program, I was in a desperate state, I couldn't afford the move to san francisco so makeschool was definitely out of the question. At the time my only move was to attend coding dojo and pull out a 10k loan which was highly risky for my age. Being 23 in the adult world isn't as easy as it looks, people tend to not take you seriously majority of the time, unless you are highly skilled and a hard negotiator, which I am not. Then came Lambda School, I came across the ad on facebook, and I was fascinated by the high amounts of praise for their instructors. I took a look at their website, and then I applied/took

Hello,     First and for most, I want to thank those for reading my blog. It definitely means a lot to me that you willing to know more about the school that is making such an impact on my life and the process of becoming a developer. We just started our 2nd week of mongodb and what I've noticed is that the process of making an api is getting harder and harder. We learned that promises over callbacks tend to have a cleaner look rather than callbacks, because it makes them easier to read. Also with the more complex web apps that is being built the harder the back end is going to be. This stuff is not easy, but boy oh boy, stuff like this is making me love cs even more. I'm definitely going to have to practice more backend stuff, because programming stuff like this makes me feel even more like a programmer.   As for the project goes so far we have our first full stack project coming up real soon, so my mind is having mixed thoughts on what I want to do as a project, because this

Hello,    So far we have completed a 1/3 of the course and still have many things to go over as we proceed to our 3rd month. As of now we are just learning how to develop our first api and for those who don't know an api stands for application programming interface, it is a set of instructions to help the communication of a client and a server. To be honest I think it is a lot more fun to code the backend rather than the front end just because of the fact that I have been coding the frontend for a while now and something new like coding the backend has really caught my eye.   Just about a week ago, I had the feeling of being burnt out , and wanted to switch out of my cohort. Suddenly it hit me though, I realized that too much of something wasn't good for me, so I decided to take a trip somewhere. I wanted someplace perfect. Someplace that didn't cost too much money and was also fun at the same time. Disneyland was pretty much in my reach, it wasn't too far of a dri

Hello again,     For this week, it has been a pretty rough one. I dealt with a Monday being burnt out on everything. I was learning everyday and was starting to feel a little bit burnt out on everything that was being thrown at me. I felt burnt out because I felt like I wasn't moving forward with my life and that I was stuck in the middle of the mud with all this hoping in my head. It suddenly came to me though, why I started looking for a good coding school and why I started this blog in the first and that was to make something out of myself. The reason why I decided to go with a coding school and to not continue with college was to prove the people that doubted me wrong. I wanted to shut them up and prove a point. For me to accomplish this though would require me a tremendous amount of work. I know my path and I want to set things straight. I started all of this so I can have a sense of belonging in my family.   Just today we had our brown bag from austen today about startups.

Hello,     Things are just starting to become more difficult for me as time passes through. As I get more and more concentrated in the work and the progress I want to achieve I feel as if there a lot of things that are just holding me back. I have not mentioned this before but as my current living standards at this point, I am couch hopping at the moment to find a proper place to rent, which is extremely sad for me. It is very hard to concentrate on my school, when the people that I am living with right now is sort of pushing me out and I have a feeling that matters are going to exceed to a higher point, because of a visiting from their parents.    As of currently right now I don't know where I will end up at this point and as of right now, I feel like the friendship between myself and my roommates (who is a couple , need I mention) is getting more distant. The possibilities of living with these two are coming close to an end and our relationship is coming to a near end as well.

Hello,    Coming back from another class session and this time around. I am actually done with the first month of lambda school. The experience so far has been quite of a rocky start, but as time progressed, we are all now starting to get comfortable with each other (hopefully). By now we have just started our course towards the more advanced topics like react js and redux, along with data fetching protocols. We are almost done with our http/ajax sprint which consists of making a friendslist application that incorporates a middleWare type extension to handle data fetching protocols. We are learning so much on fullstack development and this is basically what I wanted in the first place.    Javascript has also being a part of my strong points this time around since I'm working on it everyday from this point. Pretty much my knowledge and growth for computer science is expanding and as of now. The best analogy that we have been taught was that your source of knowledge for computer scie

Hello again,     It is getting close to the end of our first month. and so far we have started lessons on our first framework. Like javascript, its basically combining html, css and javascript into 1 whole library. Basically web developers galore if you were to put it into words. The concept of making separate components in each separate file can get pretty irritating at first, and not mentioning the fact of combining all of your languages into one whole framework. In reality just like all other things it just requires a lot of repetition and practice. So far I'm doing all that I can to practice as much as I can during the weekend.    There has also been a slight problem as well, and I literally was not hoping I would have to deal with such a thing but ever since elementary school and also middle school, things always felt sort of like a competition. You find one other student, that is either looking down upon you or they are just completely on your level in knowledge of a ce

Hello again,     The last time I have written a blog was about the 3rd day I started school for lambda, well by now its the end of the 2nd week. So far I am enjoying every bit of learning computer science and learning about the things I am so passionate about. So far we have gotten through  the data structures content and have went through hashtables, trees and graphs. The important one was making sure that your code had a simplistic time complexity, which what we call the Big O notation. These measurements would test out the complexity of the algorithm you wrote. Theres already plans of making a project for the demo night and I have made many friends from the program!. There is still things that need to be worked on, but so far it is going pretty great. I have learned a lot, and I intend to keep going down this path.    The opportunities  are far too great by the time the 6 months are over and by the time the program is over, my background in computer science would be far greater

    Hello,         So far its been day 3 of the program, and right now things are just going a little bit slower than expected. Luckily this program is 6 months long with the content we are learning. My partner and I have been following along with the curriculum and so far my partner has been pretty slow with the work. He had a difficult time understanding the content, and with the experience that I have acquired from programming in java and also swift, javascript just kind of flowed naturally for me, especially working with object oriented and also class structured syntax. The environment I have been in was not the best at all either. So far I have been crashing on my friends couch for the past couple of days, on the lookout for a place to rent for the next 6 months. So far I have been learning a lot and have been working on my javascript 4 to 6 hours each day. Its only day 3 for now and the objective for right now is to keep up with the content as much as  I can.     Right n

Hello,      So I decided to do another post before I officially start my class on monday. This is a different type of school, so I have to keep in mind that the structure of the classroom is going to be different from a traditional 4 year university. Whats going to be new to me is that basically I'm going to be taught from a webcam application called zoom where basically people would have meetings.   As I prepare for class on monday, I took a look at the syllabus and they just sent us out a schedule of the 6 months that is going to take place. It was very structured and they seem like they know what they were doing with this. My strengths in javascript is starting to become more pure and I basically have determined of which languages are now my strong suite.   Over the span of 6 months we are going to be taught not only javascript, but c++, react, designing api, computer architecture, advanced algorithms, data structures, and a lot more!. Which concludes to the capstone pro

Hello Again,     Its been a couple of weeks since I have made a post but let me just recap of what I went through during my time. Over the past few weeks I have been contemplating on wether or not I should attend the product college and fully commit to the move to san francisco. Although there didnt seem any other choice but to do the interview for the product college, I cam across an ad on facebook. I wasnt surprised on how many coding school ads I got a day onto facebook, but this one literally came clutch. I clicked on the link and I was surprised to see that there was another school that fell under the same category under makeschool. It was called lambda academy of computer science, and no its not a calculus class. What shocked me even more was that it was a full online immersive program, I saw nothing but positive reviews for the school. I immediately clicked the apply section, and put in all of my personal information    Besides all the basic procedures for an application

  Hello, so far my self learning route has taken me to many paths of my education. Theres so much more I want to learn and so much more I need to learn, but I am comfortable to say that my levels as a self-learning developer are at an above average. With the resources that I discover over the internet and one simple click of the search engine, I learn so much more than just sitting in a classroom all day studying for an exam. The important things to keep in mind when going through the self learning route is knowing what you need to know in order to be prepared for the career path you have choosen. For example with computer science and becoming a developer, I know that it took more than just knowing computer languages to become a good programmer, so I wrote down a list of things to study to help me with my journey. Data structures, algorithms, oop, problem solving, discrete mathematics, front-end development and also backend development are the key essentials of what makes a good com

Hello again,      So far my self learning route is slow due to personal issues of being depressed and sick most of the time, but I feel as if my understanding of the flow of data and how things are produced in code are getting better and better. As of right now, I am taking a course on coursera, which is basically a self learning web application that can let you participate in college courses. As for obvious reasons, I am taking the computer science course and so far, I am learning a lot. Also thanks to java, it helped me get the clear understanding of how object oriented programming works and I'm just getting started too. I completed the java course on codeacademy as well, as I move forward, I am studying to fully understand and become fluent in the java language. If I do this then programming in c#, C or even c++ will be near. I have tried python, ruby, and even swft and I just cant seem to the experience for it, with java it feels like I can get the full programming experien

So,     Continuing from I last wrote, I have recently made a discovery on these "hackathons" that take place in california and all over the world. These hackathons are there to partner up with people to form an idea or product to showcase to the crowd within the time limit. Its basically a codeathon for product making, you have 36 hours which is basically the whole weekend, and after further research, I decided to do one since reading reviews on how great it was. It will also be a good experience for me and my friend who has never coded before. This will especially be a good experience for him since a lot of people have been to a hackathon before and never coded before, people will learn along the way to be able to make a full fledged product. I have applied us to two hackathons and this should be quite the experience during the summer time, we also have the summer academy as well to keep us occupied. For now, we are on the self learning route and it is going pretty sw

Hello ,    As through further days I made some recent discoveries. There were few reasons why I started this blog. One was to prove to those people that you can be successful without earning a degree, second was to kickstart my career as a developer and third was to show that you don't need a cs degree to learn to program. Out of the silicon valley developers about half of the stats show that these developers were self taught and don't have a computer science degree. When I took CS at channel islands I felt as if the learning material that they were providing me wasn't enough to get into the development career. They didn't show you the necessary to tools to get into the development field such as launching your own product and using what they learned to adapt to code. Also if someone has recently been offered the position from a computer science degree, it is most likely that they have self-taught themselves this stuff, also as I have said before I don't think I

Hello again,     Just recently I have applied to the make school academy and also planning to apply to the learners guild bootcamp both are really promising school and I am hoping to hear my acceptance to one or even both of them. Both are really good schools and side of it being an alternative to a 4 year university is promising. I just recently discovered on how the interview process for the tech companies work, they conduct a series of questions on your coding and also your portfolio which is intended to be your github. They also ask you a series of programming questions to test your skills a little. I just recently joined a website called codingfight and its basically a website that tests your algorithmic and problem solving skills which is a perfect way to prepare yourself for a technical interview. What tech employers really look for in a young programmer is not credentials but the ability to code and a clean portfolio. I plan to build these skills up and I am hoping these scho

Hello,      Its been a while since my last blog of my 2016 journey. So far I have gotten pretty in what I have learned over the past few months of 2017. Right now my strong base of languages consist of html, java/javascript, css, swift and c#. I still have yet to practice my c# but what I am really looking to expanding is knowledge for java and also swift. I have taken mobile development a little seriously, and taken the initiative to find myself a coding bootcamp, to build a professional connection and also continuing in building a professional portfolio. So far the bootcamps that I have applied to are the following Hack Reactor, app academy and makeschool. So far the best that I have seen so far that has a good variety along with a younger generation vibe is makeschool. I hope for the best since I just submitted my application, and hoping I get in. Whichever one I get into will technically be my stepping stool to get into the development field of work and also create networks and