Have you ever wondered why we say that joining a bootcamp is a life changing experience?
Well, you will learn completely new programming skills, be taught a whole new job in 9 intense weeks only and become part of a family of 12.000 programmers worldwide for the rest of your life. That is life changing for sure!
But most importantly, you will also undeniably go through a personal development experience where you will learn more about yourself and your brain than you have in the past few years.
First of all and to put it simply : learning programming languages will show you how your brain works.
See it as a mirror of your brain’s logic and complexity as writing lines of code will reflect how your brain sorts things out. Indeed, two different people will use two different paths in code to reach the same result.
Coding is a matter of choices. Have you heard of the Marshmallow experience ?
In 1972, Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University conducted an experiment where children were offered to choose between a small and immediate reward, or 2 small rewards only if they waited for a period of time. The result was that among the children, those who waited to have 2 rewards had better life outcomes than the ones who chose the immediate reward.
But what does this have to do with code? When we code, we often choose to go with the simple solution or we can go with that more complex but lasting solution that will generate long-term results. Learning programming will train you to make the best choices when solving a problem. It is like a gymnastic you will have to teach your brain again and again.
Then, programming will teach you how you can become resilient and let your pride aside.
Coders have a wide range of abilities including problem solving skills, creativity and rigour. Joining a bootcamp will give you the opportunity to develop those skills but don’t mistake us, it will not be an easy job.
When you think that you are the one testing your code, the code will be testing you at the same time. That’s when you will measure how resilient you are. How will you react when facing a bug in your code ? How will you cope with struggling to find that error among the lines ? The experience will teach you that it is ok to fail and thus be resilient. You will at the same time learn the best practices to solve those bugs and increasingly love being challenged.
Finally, code is the mirror image of your own biases. Biases are preconceived ideas built by your story, education and society or are sometimes innate.
If you are a Netflix fan, you’ve probably heard - or watched - the Documentary Coded Biases by Shalini Kantayya. This documentary explores how algorithms and code propagate biases especially towards people of color. Their research discovered that some code could not detect faces of color or classify women with accuracy.
In fact when you code, you transcribe your biases in your algorithms whether you are aware of it or not. That is why coding is the direct reflection of your brain’s complexity. And that is fascinating, yet scary at the same time.
