Completing the Lambda School Program
About nine months ago, I began a new chapter and journey of my life by committing to an online program called Lambda School. The program I signed up for was a full stack web development boot-camp like education. With no prior coding experience, I was reluctant and nervous to commit and eventually begin the program. Going into Lambda School, I had a Bachelor’s degree for Applied Science of Animation and Visual Effects, and from that education I had been exposed to many new and different technologies that I had to learn at a rapid rate. This experience gave me the confidence to learn how to code as a beginner. As I look back after just completing the program, I feel overjoyed that I was willing to take that plunge into the unknown because I have come out of it with an amazing amount of knowledge and new set of skills that will undoubtedly lead me to great opportunities.
As I write this, I am ten days into my completion of the Lambda School program and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past nine months. As I stated, I went into this program with no prior coding experience, only with a deep hunger to learn new skills and satisfy my need to create and develop. The logical and technical aspect of development appealed to every bit of who I am, and it has become an unrelenting drive of what I hope to become and accomplish. I know moving forward in my job search I will be faced with new challenges and obstacles, but I am prepared to continue to learn and improve on myself as a developer and professional. Rejection can be expected to come, and I have to be prepared to use that feeling as more fuel to my fire to achieve what I want to be, which is a developer. However, I am also confident that I will be given the opportunity to prove what I am capable of doing at this point in time, as well as how capable I am of learning skills I do not have yet at a very fast rate.
As I transition from nine months of education to a job search mission, I can reflect on what has gotten me to this point. I know first and foremost it begins with my inner drive to improve myself and be a part of something bigger. Also, the support of my loving family to push me to my full potential. Practically, it was the support of my teachers, peers, and team leaders to push my understanding of the material to a deeper level. Also, the creators of Lambda to offer an amazing educational system with an income share agreement setup to battle the problems of the high financial costs of traditional higher education.
Despite this blog entry being essentially about the sentiment I have regarding my experience at Lambda, I want to touch more on the technical side of what I learned through my education. To summarize my education, the program began with teaching me HTML/CSS skills and quickly getting to Javascript fundamentals. Shortly after that I was introduced to React which was a main portion of the curriculum, since Lambda is constantly updating their curriculum based on the current industry standards. I would be taught useful other languages, libraries, and frameworks such as Redux, and shortly after being introduced to React for front end development I was taught back end development, specifically, Node.js. While learning back end development I was taught about things like relational databases, and introduced to libraries such as Express and database management systems such as SQLite and PostgreSQL. Next was a computer science course where I was introduced to Python and almost immediately forced to use it to perform advanced algorithms and functions. I ended my education with a course called Labs where it is the closest thing to real world experience that I could have. I was placed in a group with other developers and given requirements and assigned certain languages and frameworks to use to achieve the requirements.
Lastly, I would like to end this entry as both an appreciative gesture to everyone that got me to this point, as well as an acceptance to the challenge that I face. With that being said, here is the badge I received from Lambda School, proving that I completed their program and certifying that I am a full stack web developer!
Time to develop and continue my journey!
