Scoring goals with multiplayer coding education

From PHP Developer and Kindergarten Teacher to Front End Engineer, Reel Metrics

"The price was right and the reviews were really good. The tech stack also covered React, which is what I saw all the jobs posting for. On Udemy, there was no sense of community. You don't know if you're learning well or struggling. No one is asking questions. There's no way to gauge how you are doing. The Nucamp community makes all the difference."

This is Davey Mason, a Nucamp Full Stack Bootcamp graduate and now a Front End Engineer at Reel Metrics.

Davey's two favorite ways to spend his time are learning something new or enjoying one of his favorite video games.

A few of his favorite games include Guild Wars 2, FIFA Soccer, Rocket League, and Pokémon.

Professionally, he was already a web developer, but he lacked experience with modern technologies.

To level-up his skills, he traveled to China with his girlfriend and made plans to get into data science.

But, COVID stalled their plans and they were locked down without travel.

Instead of working in his chosen field he was forced to adapt and became an English teacher at the local university.

Since teaching wasn't his first choice, he tried making the most of it by picking up some tech work with a learning management system.

Needing to augment his income, he picked up another job teaching kindergarten at a school nearby.

The school gave Davey freedom to teach whatever he wanted, so he naturally chose coding, which ended up being a lot of fun.

Davey was able to leverage his passion for tech and pass it onto his class; he taught them basic logic and computation.

His goal was to get the kids interested in computers and science, in turn making his experience more enjoyable by teaching something he loved.

Teaching kindergarteners was only a portion of his day and this left him with a lot of down time outside of class.

So, he became the student and started teaching himself how to code.

He had the base knowledge of HTML and CSS, so started taking Udemy and Coursera classes in hopes of modernizing his skillset.

Both platforms didn't have the structure for him to do as well as he thought.

Teaching himself came with the uncertainty of what exactly was important to cover.

Davey tried Python, 3D modeling, and a few others, but an increasing number of job openings he came across asked for React skills.

It was decided; his new mission was to learn React.

After his slow progress teaching himself, he started searching for a structured learning environment.

He found Nucamp, the amazing reviews, the right tech stack, and the affordable price—it was hard to pass up.

Prone to overthinking new endeavors, and delaying them, Nucamp made it much easier to get started right away.

"It was helpful to know what you needed to do week-by-week. This helped break down the heavy content load. Seeing other students saying "I found this hard," was reassuring that I was not alone. I was learning and not doing things in the wrong way."

Describe your job search process.

Davey hadn't planned on looking for jobs until after graduation.

He also took it upon himself to take a course specific to updating his LinkedIn, resume, and getting professional photos taken.

Davey was offered a handful of jobs and they each gave him take-home assessments.

This was a great learning experience for him.

He ended up taking a React Engineering position with a company that prioritized learning, which was the perfect fit for him.

Davey accepted the position right before finishing his coding bootcamp.

What advice do you have for people who are thinking about attending a bootcamp, but haven't yet registered?

"There are so many free materials out there that are good. It is a good approach, but you have to be the type of person that doesn't necessarily need community and structure to utilize them effectively."