Week 19 at gSchool: Front End Technologies

Cameron Buckingham is a student at gSchool, a 6-month coding school in Colorado. He blogs each week about his experience at gSchool- this week, Cameron talks about an interesting article in the bootcamp community and focusing more on front-end technologies!

Remember, the Course Report community is eligible for a $500 scholarship to gSchool!

Thanks everyone for reaching out to me to ask questions about gSchool. I am glad this blog is helping you all understand what is out there and how gSchool separates itself from other similar schools.

For anyone that is interested I included a very interesting article written by notable tech writer in the industry: http://zedshaw.com/2014/10/19/the-coming-code-bootcamp-destruction/. A little about Zed Shaw can be found on the about page, but in essence he has very deep roots in the tech education industry. If you are interested in going to any dev bootcamp be sure to read this article to get some other perspective. I feel like when I started looking for schools I only read positive articles but this one does not qualify as a positive article. It seems he is frustrated with how much people are falling into the "trap" of what dev bootcamps are promising and extremely frustrated with the inner workings of some schools that he feels operate in a really abusive manner. Give it a read and let me know what you think :)

In terms of gSchool, we are officially entrenched in the job hunt here. Since Ruby is a solid practice for most us, we have pushed our instructors to do more JavaScript and some other front-end stuff like Angular JS. As we are getting into the job hunt, our time is stretched pretty thin. I would say that 1/2 of my day is on just correspondence with potential employees, interview prep, actual interviews, tech interviews, and working on tech interviews. The other 1/2 is doing class projects and the occasional lecture or two. gSchool does a great job expanding its network with potential employers. I would say we still have at least 2-4 employees looking for RoR developers come into the office and recruit us. 

On a more fun note, since our class has only about a month left we are all pushing for a lot of morale events. With the holidays coming up, we have a Halloween party and even a "Prom";  so it looks like I will have to break out the suit and tie for that one. Also a month ago, when it started to get cold, we started having weekly "Soup Parties" that are located at various students' houses where we throw back some delicious soup and brewskis too. 
Anyways I hope this entry was interesting, I will shoot another one out in two weeks, hopefully I will be employed by then. Fingers crossed.

Cam