[cblock811]

I just look at bootcamps as part of starting your education. I would never consider a graduate to be a serious software engineer. I have been building apps for the company I work with and definitely realize that it takes years of dedication.

On my end I think I need to find something outside of work that I want to build. There are so many neat things out there. I just need to figure out what excites me as I get more into the industry.

[ChristopherM]

If you need that push to jump into learning something completely new, like programming. A bootcamp can certainly get you started. Although I would consider it to be a very expensive way to get started. My other concern is the false sense of confidence that one now has a thorough understanding of the subject.

What languages, frameworks do you now have experience with? Ruby on Rails? Are you primarily interested in web development? Software development is a huge field with many specialties. Web development is completely different from native application development, server development is completely different from GUI applications. Firmware and device drivers yet again are very, very different from the already mentioned specialties. Then there are specialties like algorithm development, encoding, artificial neural networks, encryption, compression, game logic AI, etc. Pick one thing, because you will quickly lose your focus if you keep bouncing from topic to topic.

I'm currently finishing up my first app for the Apple Itunes store. Things I had to learn to accomplish this: Objective-C, Cocos2D framework, openGL, Adobe Illustrator, Quartz 2D, Cocoa Touch, XCode, Git, FreeBSD (to host my custom game server), TCP/IP, UDP, mono. And that's just the programming stuff. I had to create a very intelligent algorithm to handle the computer player AI.

Prior to taking on such a monumental project, I had over 20 years of experience with x86 assembly, C/C++/C#, desktop application development experience using MFC and .Net, firmware development for ARM processors, device driver development on windows, simulator development for an engineering shop, manufacturing operations and testing software with database backend, reverse engineering of cell phones for forensic analysis, software development management, and the director of software engineering for a medical device company.

What are you most intersted in? The topic you are MOST interested in. Start there. If you tell me more about what you are looking to do, I can certainly point you in the right direction.

[cblock811]

I know Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Analyzing data is fun for me. Luckily I work for a company that has a distributed processing platform and copies of the web to crawl. I've built some simple data apps in Ruby, but and planning to learn Python as well soon.

Good advice on being focused. When I was self teaching I felt like I was getting great exposure, but not direction. My bootcamp was meant to solve that issue, which it did. To be fair my bootcamp was Bloc.io and is online, making it cheaper than most bootcamps. There were some tradeoffs because of that type of curriculum but it got me started. Now I work with a team that is super supportive of me wanting to learn more. Super helpful to have people to support you and answer questions.