Starting a new chapter...becoming a software developer

An update.

If you are an avid reader of Gingerbread Smiles or know me in 'real-life', you'll know my life story and that I had been working in marketing. I'd been doing that for the past eight years and for a while now I've known that I needed a change. Although I did enjoy what I was doing, what I needed was something new. A new challenge. Something that would play to my strengths.

I'm not going to lie, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. I had to look around to see what I liked the look of, and what I was really going to enjoy on a daily basis. As I'm a homeowner and someone who likes the luxuries of life - like our holidays to America and going out to eat - I knew that taking too much time out of employment was not really an option. So, unfortunately, a three-year degree was off the table. Don't get me wrong, if that's what I needed to do, we would have found a way.

However, in my searches, I came across a coding Bootcamp (Northcoders, located in Leeds) which looked right up my street. I'd learn Javascript, the only main language to run and browsers and servers and the most popular programming language across the world. The course would equip me with the skills to *hopefully* take up a career as a junior software developer.

Well, I stumbled across this in January this year, and as they say, the rest is history. I'm now right in the midst of it, in week five in fact. It's been a fast-paced and exciting few weeks and I can't quite believe we've progressed so quickly and that we've learnt as much as we have. For the first three weeks, we took on the fundamentals. Although we had to undertake a 'pre-course' to ensure we were all on the same level, the fundamentals really delved into the basics and ensured we could all write what we needed and have the building blocks for our next modules.

For the past five weeks, I've been so into the world of coding that I've been going to sleep thinking of solutions to problems we've been working on. But... I love it. I think that is what matters. I have not been dreading any day. I feel so much happier and I've got all my fingers and toes crossed that at the end of this I get to start a career in the tech world.

As I have plenty of time to waste on the train to and from Leeds every day, and there is only so much Netflix one girl can take, I want to start keeping my blog updated regularly. So I'm looking to do an update on the course after every block and throw a few food blogs in there too. Oh and maybe write about last year's American trip...