Here we are at the end of week four of our journey through The Iron Yard. I had intentions of writing about my journey thus far but writing intimidates me so I kept putting it off. Then our instructor mentioned this week that he wanted us to be writing about our experience and just like that my hopes of avoiding and putting off writing vanished in a brilliant flash of light. Well the flash of light may have been the lightening from the the thunderstorms rolling through at the moment but it was appropriately timed. So, without further adieu let’s get this thing rolling.

First, a little bit of backstory, cue the dreamy music and wavy lines to enter flashback mode. 2015 was a major turning point in my life and I found myself at a turning point in my career. After attempting to learn new programming languages on my own I started looking around for classes that I could take to help me over some of the hurdles I was having. This brought me around to The Iron Yard. The Iron Yard is a code school with campuses all across the country. After talking to some recruiters, friends, and family I took the plunge to enroll. This was very nerve racking for me at the thought of going back to school when I felt like I should have been able to learn on my own. With some encouragement from my amazing wife I was able to overcome that and jump right in.

I am not a visual designer or expert in typography so it only made sense for me to jump into the iOS engineering class. While I am still a bit nervous about the visual design aspect of mobile development I am glad that I chose this class. One part of programming that I love is the challenge and that reward when everything falls in place and you have a product that you made. This has been the most intense four weeks up to this point but it has been so rewarding. Each week builds on the previous and things just start to fall in place.

Even though it’s only been four weeks so far it feels like it’s been an eternity given the amount of material that we’ve covered. At the same time I can’t believe it’s already been four weeks. I came into this program with a little bit of knowledge about iOS development but no confidence that I could pick up and start an app from scratch and make it work. Now we are building apps everyday and I noticed this week that some muscle memory is starting to set in and I’m putting together some pieces without thinking about it.

There have definitely been some times where it’s felt overwhelming but our instructor, Jeff, has been pretty great at getting us through it. I also have some pretty awesome classmates that come together to help each other out and work through any issues we are having with the assignments. I am still struggling a bit with my confidence on some things but being able to talk things out with the class has been invaluable. We were told up front that it was going to be intense but it’s hard to comprehend that until you get into it. We’re not spending time in the shallow end. It’s the deep and learning to swim all the way. Our instructor shared this to demonstrate how the class was going to be.

This has been an exciting four weeks so far and only eight more weeks to go. Looking forward to continuing this journey and seeing what lies ahead on the other side.