Wow, it’s been awhile since I updated this blog! In the past few months, I’ve taken on a part-time temp job, started a grassroots group, and most relevant to this blog, I’ve gained a solid grasp of Javascript. I know I said I was going to focus on a few online classes, but instead I got sidetracked by Code School. My mom bought me a 6-month subscription for Christmas and I got right to work on their Javascript Road Trip: Part 2 course.
I am so glad I tried out Code School because after struggling through so many other resources, it was their course that finally made me understand Javascript. After finishing Javascript Road Trip: Part 2, I was finally able to go back and complete my two unfinished Thinkful projects.
I followed this up with Javascript Road Trip: Part 3. These courses were thorough and challenging. There were times I got frustrated and had to walk away from their code challenges. I was always able to go back and eventually solve them, however.
It also made me realized why I felt so frustrated while in my Thinkful: Front End Development course. The Thinkful curriculum just isn’t good. In fact, most of my learning came from Treehouse videos. I was building off that knowledge when I completed my first few Thinkful projects. Combine this with a bad mentor match, and you get a pretty poor experience. I know now that I should have request a different mentor early on. I didn’t trust much of what he told me, because he used techniques that I’ve read are really outdated. Let this be a warning to everyone- just because someone has years of experience as a computer programmer doesn’t mean they’ll be up to date with modern web development. Or that they’ll be a good teacher. He would dump advanced programming concepts on me before I really had the fundamentals down. This is also a reflection of Thinkful’s poor curriculum, however, because any mentor would have to fill in a lot of gaps.
I’m not saying don’t use Thinkful. There are good aspects of it– the weekly mentor meetings and projects for one. They also have a very active community. I would recommend supplementing Thinkful’s curriculum with Treehouse and Code School if it’s something you decide to do, though. And who knows, they may have updated the curriculum significantly since September.
I’ll be sticking to other, cheaper resources. I’ve been learning Python with Think Python. My goal is to learn a back-end language, but I may be switching to Ruby instead. We’ll see.