This is an article that I originally wrote for my Wordpress site but have moved here.

It was around early June that I stumbled upon Coding Bootcamps. Coding Bootcamps get their name because those who enter into them are immersed in the coding culture and in languages and emerge with new skills and different ways of thinking than before, mimicking the military’s bootcamp process. It’s more of an analogy.

Anyways, I discovered bootcamps. I had reached the point in those four to five months where I knew that if I wanted to continue in my journey, better yet, speed up my journey, I would need someone to help me along the way. I was not interested in teaching myself to code for two years before being able to apply for jobs.

Disclaimer: I realize and recognize that I will be ‘learning to code’ for the remainder of my life, I was looking primarily to speed up the process with which I got a job doing work I valued.

So I bounced through every major bootcamp out there (Fullstack Academy, General Assembly, Flatiron, etc). As I was looking my focus on bootcamps began to be narrowed to specialized bootcamps. By that I mean a bootcamp that is a local bootcamp to a City that is connected to businesses. This was where I found things like Project Shift in the Raleigh Durham area of North Carolina (I live in South Carolina). As I was looking I stumbled across what looked like a bootcamp in South Carolina, IN MY CITY! It is a rather new bootcamp. So I was back and forth for a while with the bootcamp in Raleigh and the one that is local because the one in Raleigh seemed to be a little bit more established.

So this is about two weeks into June and I finally decided try to be apart of the next night cohort for the local bootcamp in my city. As my wife and I evaluated this decision though we decided it would be better for me to do the full-time day cohort instead of night because it would have been ten months long for the night cohort. So we decided on the day cohort.

At the end of June my time working with the church came to an end. This was planned and it went about as smoothly as could be expected for a transition during a pandemic.

For the month of July I worked at a warehouse unloading furniture off of 18-wheeler trucks and carrying the furniture around all day. I will say, God did not create me for the heat. The heat doesn’t like me and I don’t like it. But where I live is very hot. God has a sense of humor. Needless to say, although the guys I worked with were great and I admire them for their ability to endure day to day in the heat like that, I was only there until the day cohort started which was August 1st.

So I worked from the end of June until August and then began the bootcamp.

This is the very plain version of my Journey to Code. From this point forward I am on a Journey in Code.

I will write one more, potentially multi-part blog series on the struggles I went through of transitioning from ministry to ‘the real world.’ It’ll be a more theological, psychological, personal struggles type of thing. So look for that in the coming weeks.