The Coding academy was an awesome experience. For a little bit of extra information, it was roughly a year long (for me, it’s self paced) full-stack development course by Bottega Tech. It’s mostly front-end focused, learning html, scss, and js and how to make calls from an API and best practices with making websites. It’s also very react heavy, react being a popular framework from Facebook.
It took me so long because I was a full time student at K State University at the same time. Many people have asked what the differences were between the two schoolings, and they were pretty different. My Computer Science degree had huge math and logic focus, with a large variance in topics. I would be working on C# with Visual Studio, SQL databases, working with assembly code, etc. It was a more holistic, and “engineering” education. The Bottega course, however, was 95% focused on deep diving into web development. And while it focused on the more academic side a bit, it was mostly building different projects (guided and unguided) to get as much experience as possible.
While I obviously learned more at K State, K State could learn a lot from the progression given from Bottega Tech. It ramped up in difficulty really well and the projects being based solely on real world applications helped a lot with getting real experience building these apps. Something K State struggled with, where the projects would often be so randomly difficult that you needed help from the 10 students in a 150 student class who actually understood it, making it so you didn’t learn nearly as much.
After you complete all the coursework and projects, which took me about 10 months, you get to choose your own final project. I built a website for my rugby team, as well as an api and database full of players for the team. The design isn’t great and some of the pages are blank placeholders, but creating the database, api, and website made me learn a lot about how they all talk to each other and really built my confidence with building any part of web apps.
