It was mid-November last year that I graduated from General Assembly’s Ruby-on-Rails backend course. Since then, I’ve built and launched my first startup, a marketplace for conference videos, called Xavy.
Before joining the course, I had massive reservations about whether I would actually be able to code. I’d tried and failed to learn independently at least three times before. I have always studied humanities subjects and avoided logic or maths wherever possible. My family and friends thought I was joking when I told them what I planned on doing, the response generally being “but you’re not remotely technical!”
Well, I took the course and succeeded in learning to code, so thank you GA for helping me learn the technical skills I needed to start executing on the vision I had for Xavy.
However, you can’t learn everything in 8 weeks, so here are some of the technical lessons I’ve learned since graduating, which could prove useful to anyone else taking the course:
There’s no substitute for hard work.
If you expect to turn up to class, do the 2 x 2 hour lessons each week and be a decent programmer 8 weeks later, you will probably not get the results you want. I put in a lot of additional hours between classes, and particularly in the early days, it’s important to build your ‘muscle memory’ for the key concepts until they become second nature. Continue reading
