From a career of a pathologist to a business owner who decided to upgrade his skill set by studying at Coding Bootcamp Praha. The professional journey of Šimon Cipro has taken many exciting turns, and now he is exploring a new one of a business owner who also codes his own e-shop. Šimon has a degree in medicine from Charles University and worked several years at the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine.
After launching his own project, Šimon has worked with programmers for a number of years and throughout this process, he found a passion for coding himself. His goal was clear - he’d have a better overview of the development of his app, make better decisions, work more efficiently with other developers, and take over part of the development himself. Has studying a coding bootcamp programme helped Šimon to reach his goal? And how is his business doing after he graduated?
Your career sounds like a rollercoaster! Tell us more about how the idea of you learning to code was born?
I used to do some basic offline programming in Pascal back in high school but it was a long time ago :-) It had nothing to do with the web applications that we know now. The idea of programming started in my latest job. I am the owner of a small e-commerce company that provides training, equipping, and raising dogs. The online world is the primary focus of our business.
Among other things, we felt the need to have an in-house developer because of new projects ahead of us. I liked coding and technology, and I wanted to do it myself. The lack of developers in our company gave us two options: hire somebody or try learning. I felt that I should give it a try :D My passion for all programming led to my decision to take part in an intensive coding bootcamp, and see if after three months I'm able to do it myself. Right now, It's a new aspect of my work.
“My passion for programming led to my decision to take part in an intensive coding bootcamp, and see if after three months I'm able to do it myself.”
Why did you choose to study at a coding bootcamp as your education path?
Because of my remote living, out of Prague, I was searching for an online program. My decision was mostly impacted by the clearly structured syllabus Coding Bootcamp Praha has offered me. I appreciated that it teaches fullstack. We got familiar with all languages, backend, and frontend. It felt so right and detailed. When you start coding you need to know different possibilities and I didn't know nor expect that I would learn all of this in such depth.
I signed up about a month before my batch started. The Prebootcamp Studies were essential, important, and encouraging. It will save you a lot of stress in the beginning. First two weeks of Coding Bootcamp you can repeat and enhance all that you learned in the Prebootcamp studies. You will feel much more confident if you already know what the instructor is talking about.
(Source. Simon Cipro at his regular "office" day)
What challenges did you face during the course?
The biggest challenge was to understand and accept the many things you have to do by yourself. But that is the right way. You learn how these things work in real life in the end. The challenge was to switch from the expectation that instructors can teach me everything. Of course, I could ask for help when I got stuck, but I also needed to figure out how to get to a solution by myself.
In your experience, what should prospective students pay attention to?
We are all different and we don’t expect the same. I got what I expected, so I'm a hundred percent happy with it. Everyone who starts a coding bootcamp must understand that the most important resource is time. Besides doing the Prebootcamp Studies, it is essential to understand that coding takes time. Bootcamp is a full-time study programme, plus, it asks for your time also on weekends.
What was the most satisfying part of the Coding Bootcamp Praha learning experience?
Shortly, self-improvement. Oh, what a joy that is! Finding a solution is a hyper moment.
On Monday day 1, the very first day, you cannot do anything. Tuesday, you build a simple site, three weeks after it has some interactivity thanks to JavaScript. That's insane, comforting, and enjoyable. For me, the best feeling is being stuck somewhere and then finding a solution by myself. The most memorable moment is every second when you finish a task and the project starts to work as expected.
“The most memorable moment is every second when you finish a task and the project starts to work as expected.”
You have already graduated in November 2020. How do you evaluate the learning experience at Coding Bootcamp Praha?
The learning process is really steep, but the way of learning empowers you as a person and a professional. You can feel desperate, stuck and the solution seems far away sometimes but the overall experience is a pleasurable cause of the self-progress feeling. Even if it sounds like perfect marketing for other students, I must say it :D My experience in this Bootcamp showed me results super fast. Improvement and progress can be seen from one day to another.
I went to study coding to change my approach to running my business with the new things that I learned. You can learn React or PHP by yourself but a coding bootcamp puts everything together. You know what you need to install. For example, Node, Github, and all of those basics aren’t obvious to find, and I’m sure it would take months. But once you learn the basics from the Prebootcamp Studies, plus you have knowledge from the bootcamp itself, you will easily upgrade on top of that.
Now, the most exciting part - your business! How have you utilised programming skills in your project?
After graduation, I felt I had good basics of relevant programming languages. Despite I still considered myself a beginner, I felt confident enough to be the only programmer for my company :D I’m happy to say that I can fix many bugs, update custom-made plugins, and similar changes. Before the bootcamp I would have had no idea how to do that and would depend on other developers and their availability. So it's nice that I can do those things by myself.