A hop from biotech to tech
It happens that some life decisions take you on the wildest of rides. I’m riding a Shinkansen of roller coasters right now. It’s called a coding bootcamp.
Attending a coding bootcamp for me was a curiosity-driven decision that didn’t just happen overnight. It took me a few years of lurking on social media groups dedicated to programming, solving coding exercises, attending meetups for coding beginners and finally, a Python for beginners summer camp organised by Pink Programming, that truly tilted the needle from “hobby” curiosity into a “let’s do something about it” type of curiosity.
At my latest job as a research engineer I was lucky enough to operate very sophisticated automated liquid handling robots, which required some “robot whispering” in a form of drag & drop programming. For me it was very exciting to think of a solution and write it in a form of a script that simplified and made our daily activities in the lab more efficient. Very hands-on and real-life application of my coding. Yay for automation!
Still, I wanted to learn and write more of the “native” code and perhaps merge coding with my biotech background in the future but that’s another story.
After some more thought I decided to go for a Technigo frontend bootcamp, completed a coding challenge, got accepted and here I am now, half way in already and enjoying it a lot!
By definition a bootcamp is supposed to be short and intensive and that’s exactly what this coding bootcamp is. I am learning new programming concepts weekly and have to implement them by finishing one project per week. Starting off by HTML and CSS, I am now mostly writing code in JavaScript and React. Very very soon I’ll be greeting Redux as well.
Constant change and improvements in form of gaining & implementing knowledge are the largest energisers and motivators that keep me going and make me look forward to every following week.
It would not be fair to say it’s all rainbows and unicorns, though. Studying something so different from biotechnology at such an intensive pace and quite some years after I finished university is not easy. Keeping the fast pace of delivering projects and dealing with life that comes in a way (wouldn’t recommend moving during a bootcamp, by the way), can make some weeks more stressful and overwhelming than the others.
Luckily I have been preparing for this ride during the summer and am using some tricks to help me go through it, which I’ll be sharing in another article. In addition, I am very lucky to be surrounded by a supportive bunch of people and a great team at Technigo which makes it all even more enjoyable and doable.
With three months in and three more to go I can say I am very happy with my decision and I think something great will come out of it. Now excuse me, I need to fasten my seat belt and go and greet Redux! o/
