Figuring it out! Random Thoughts.
Over the past few months I have talked about frustrations in being a Lambda School student, about what to do differently. The reality is that while it is frustrating that the organization that in part holds my ability to be successful is seemingly ignoring the responsibilities that they signed up for when they built a school there is another side.
You see in fairness me stepping into the suck and learning materials is on me. To that end I have already surpassed Lambda School for the most part (Computer Science, or CS not withstanding). I have learned TypeScript, and have advocated for others to learn it, and have even harassed Lambda about putting it into their curriculum. I have learned about GraphQL, and started toying with it in an effort to learn it to have a better rounded stack. At the end of the day though I can honestly say… I love some MERN. I really truly do.
In truth this was one of my struggles at Lambda School, and why I ended up restarting Unit 4, or the single Back End unit. It wasn’t that it was hard, or super complex (as it should really be), but more along the lines of familiarity with Mongo & Mongoose.
Going from Mongoose to using a query builder like Knex is not a fun experience, and learning things about SQL like joins is a bit of a frustration. That said SQL, PostgreSQL and MySQL especially, are critical skills, that at the moment I am lacking.
Why? Because SQL truly does make the world go around. Mongo might be awesome, but at the end of the day so many legacy projects, and even new projects. Additionally, by retaking this unit it gives me more time to shuffle things around, and dig into things a bit more deeply.
I will be honest however, it is very discouraging to have to retake a unit, and to have the rug pulled out from under you even further. You see Lambda cut support when I went into Unit 2, and now any semblance is essentially gone. Sure there are QAs, sure there is a help channel, but at the end of the day, and perhaps this is just me, getting 1 to 1 feedback, and critiques based upon what I generate is far more productive to automated tests yelling at you that the tests are failing, and no real clarification why. This is frustrating.
Add to that the announcement that the program that I am in, the Full Stack Part Time program is getting suspended… That hurts… It is essentially telling those of us that have other commitments that we are not worth investing in, because we have made it clear that we want the program, and we are willing to put in the work. So now going into what arguably amounts to the most complex portion of this program I have 1 chance to flex, or retake the CS unit, whereas others have had numerous attempts. It ups the stress and anxiety going into that unit.
But here is the end of this: I will finish whatever Lambda throws, and I will get into the industry based upon my work, as clearly Lambda Endorsements are not going to account for much if things continue to go as they have been.
How will I get into the industry? Work. Hard work. I am in the process of building out a number of projects either in conjunction with other developers or alone. These range from a ticketing/feedback forum to a full featured Learning Management System (LMS). From there I will be putting together a custom E-commerce solution, and all of these will be as full featured, clean, and will make it perfectly clear the thing that I think, that I believe. Lambda does have good Part Time students… We just go beyond Lambda and follow Austen Allred’s advice going into Lambda… We have learned to teach ourselves, because Lamba gave up.
There is a quiet rallying cry from the student body at Lambda School. We came in knowing this was going to be a challenge, that this was going to be an uphill battle, but we were fed a line about having support, and allies in Lambda. The rallying cry is this: “We will prevail regardless of Lambda!”
The sheer determination, sheer unadulterated potential will shine through.
You might find this a bit whiny, a bit frustrated. Its true. It is. But it is also a very clear statement that potential employers, and potential Lambda students should heed. We do it by ourselves. We learn to read docs, we build on OUR time, which is becoming more free without Lambda requirements except for 2 days a week. We fight up the hill step by step until we become the best that we can be, and eventually some of us will be the best in the industry. Do not discount our creativity, our intelligence, and our determination because we attend a bootcamp instead of a university. We are, and will be better than some, if not most of the people coming out of a college after 4 years. Why? Because there is no hand holding. There is no coddling, there is pure frustration until we make the learning breakthroughs.
We go hard.
