An interview with Ján Poprocsi, graduate of the Coding Bootcamp Praha's Autumn Batch, 2017. Read the story in his own words:
I finished my high school studies a little over a year before the bootcamp. I then decided to jump into the working environment rather than continuing my studies at a university. I worked as an advisor in electronics retail. During this time I realised that I would like to get back into programming. I started programming in my high school years, and I really enjoyed it. Little by little I realised I would like to go back to school and become a software developer. So I started studying on my own, and after more than half a year I decided that I needed more structure and guidance. I started researching the possibilities. After that I stumbled across coding bootcamps and one of them was in Prague. It was convenient for me not only because of the location, which was only 670km from my home, but also for the price which is significantly lower than other bootcamps around the globe. The curriculum presented on their website also fit my needs.
It wasn't always fun and games at the bootcamp, but it was also a lot of hard work and sometimes pushing beyond limits. I had days where I was coding for 12-15 hours a day, but there were also days when we had a lot of fun and went out for a beer. The other students were really great, and we made a great team together. I feel that we became friends there. We often spent our weekends together. The instructors were really great, and they taught us a lot. A really great thing was that there is a real variety among the instructors so you can sample different teaching methods and have diverse lessons. We had a lot of fun but also a challenging experience at the hackathons, which we really enjoyed. Also, it was a great experience from a teamwork perspective. Working and finishing our team projects and then presenting them showed that every one of us gave something of themselves to the final result. We finished the intense, 12-week long bootcamp with a Demo Day where we presented our final project. We chose the theme of the projects ourselves and built them together in small teams.
We also received great support with job hunting and for interview preparation. The HR workshops were really helpful along with fine-tuning our CVs and LinkedIn profiles. Meeting company partners opened doors for some of us. Others found their way by using a partner company's website called StartupJobs. A lot of us were even receiving offers 3-4 weeks before the end of the bootcamp, which was really encouraging.
After the bootcamp, the real job hunt began for me. I went to various interviews and completed numerous entry-level exercises for companies. Within 2 weeks, when I was on my way to another interview, I got a call from an American company. I was interested in the offer they gave me. I created a weather app for them, and then I went to their interview. A week after the call, I was their new employee! I work for an IBM-owned company called Bluewolf, consultant to IBM. It's a consulting and development company for Salesforce, which uses CRM software. I'm a Junior Salesforce and currently a Vlocity Developer. We work with languages like Apex, Javascript and Visualforce, which is a component-based framework using HTML tags. For the CSS part, we are using SLDS, which is something similar to Bootstrap.
If you are thinking about changing your career, making a living from programming, and joining this amazing coding bootcamp, I would suggest you first make sure that you enjoy programming with the intense hours of code writing that accompany it. After that, make sure to go through the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and so on to at least make it easier for yourself at the beginning of the bootcamp. You can follow the advice and materials offered by the Coding Bootcamp Praha for future students.
Last but not least, if I could pinpoint favourite things about Coding Bootcamp Praha - it would be the helpfulness of the instructors and also the great cooperation among students attending. Doing the programme together is much easier than doing it by yourself. A big thank you to all those who stand behind the Coding Bootcamp Praha as they have changed my life, helped me do what I love and to make a living from it.