Reflections on code school — 3 years later.

Occasionally friends will contact me about learning to code, especially since I come from a non STEM background. This post is a reflection on my experiences in learning to code, selecting a program, how I prepared for attendance, participating in the program, and how I felt after I left. I speak about negative experiences here.

While attending Makersquare the program publicly transitioned to Hack Reactor. It was purchased in 2015 becoming a subsidiary. Same program, and same head of curriculum — Kyle Simpson from the You Don’t Know JS Series. Now six months prior from the publication of this blog post, it was announced that Galvanize Acquired the brand. This blog entry will speak to my overall experience at MakerSquare/HackReactor, and my career progression since then. I can’t speak to the rebranding. In fact, I’ve been called a handful of times to be a guest speaker and the administration “can’t release curriculum”. It’s unfortunate since I’m a Security professional and would be creating custom content to fill in the gaps left by the program. I came a few times as a guest panel speaker, but holding back on materials is just silly. I remember the sprint and looking back, what it’s missing.. Therefore I’ve declined to return and have been working on content to give at conferences to the developer community.

experiences in learning to code & how I prepared for attendance:

My first experience in learning to code was at a Rails Girls meetup in San Francisco. There was quite the turn out! I…