Becoming Mongolian Princess : From demotivated architect to coding warrior

You do not need to be rich, famous, talented, or anybody at all to do something extraordinary. The sky is not the limit. There are no limits — only social, cultural, religious and self-imposed limitations. If we can break through those, I believe humans are capable of going much further both as individuals and as a species.

This is a quote that’s been on my laptop’s post-it for a long time, so long that I don’t even remember where I read it – yet it cuts through all my bullshit excuses every time I re-read it.

Excuses about being stuck in a career that is over-invested in education, time and sanity, yet there was always a little voice nagging me that I wanted more, and the time is NOW.  Or rather it’s the fear of being labeled a failure who ‘quits’? Oh yeah, let’s put age into the mix too – is it too old to start over at 33?

I have heard that adopting a super natural power in a fictional character makes hard choices easier – so from now on I will only answer to Mongolian Princess (who also rides a real fierce unicorn, both forward and backwards)  🙂

Well, tomorrow I am going to find out when we kick off Day 1 at Maker’s Academy, a three-month intensive coding boot camp. Why do they call it a ‘coding boot camp’? Immediately I am thinking of Demi Moore in GI Jane, but learning to code instead of actual ass-kicking physical combat.

The Pre-Course

Jokes aside, we have had a very intense 4 weeks pre-course to prepare us for the actual course that covered the following:

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week 1 – terminal and git version control with Octocat weekend challenge

week 2 – Ruby with Chris Pine (lovely bloke but painful to go through) Learn to program chapter 9-14

week 3 – Getting addicted to codewar + Ruby Kickstart weekend challenge with Joshua Cheek (amazing videos that walks you through the concept in plain North American English – bonus)

week 4 – Built my first website from scratch using Sinatra as framework and Heroku to deploy! Well, we had some help from the course pill but it was super fun seeing how html (structure of a webpage), CSS (making everything beautiful), javascript (linking google search and making the web interactive), and ruby (the backend?)  all come together.

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My fellow Makers

Although I found it very stressful in the first three weeks when I was still wrapping up work – I have to say it was super fun meeting and working through the pre-course with my fellow future makers.  Here are a few of whom I am sure will appear on this blog often in the future. (I think we were working on the challenge of who can write the best code while looking hot wearing a pink hat.. Dovile won 🙂

I do believe all great things come from change and having fun doing it – so here is to the first day at Maker’s.

I have a feeling it will be the beginning of a love story.