🚀 Angular and the tech maze: everything is better with AI!

It is Angular’s turn now and I could say I am officially fully back into the bootcamp 💻🔥.

After the Christmas holidays I went through a period where I seriously thought I was going to drop out. I had missed two important classes and, between that and having almost no time to study (because when you have three children, holidays are anything but a holiday 😅), I got completely overwhelmed.

But little by little I got back into the bootcamp… and it hooked me again like on day one 💙.

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🧩 Between Angular, SQL and a thousand other things

In the meantime, I bought myself an SQL course.

Yes, yes… I love it! 🤓

So I am doing a bit of everything.

While we move forward with Angular and see how the whole cycle closes, I realise something important:

At the beginning of this blog I started out saying that I did not know how I was going to study all of this, coming from the old school of textbooks 📚.

Today I say something very different:

AI is an enormous help for learning to program.

But careful 👀:

without the teacher’s guidance, this cannot be done.

There is so much information everywhere, in a thousand different formats, that it is incredibly easy to get lost. You need teachers who guide you, who mark out the path and help you not get lost among tutorials that in the end have no specific purpose.

Even so, I am absolutely clear that my path would not have been the same – and I do not know if I would have made it – without the help of AI.

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🤖 AI as a study partner

AI makes studying flow.

Because there you are, at non-working hours, solving exercises:

•the console fails ❌

•I review the code 🔍

•I look at previous exercises 📁

•I think I have got it all right now…

•and it still fails again 😩

What would happen without AI?

Or what used to happen before?

You had to wait until the next day, message the teacher, ask… and even though communication with the teachers on this bootcamp is extremely fluid (that has to be highlighted 👏), there would always be a gap of at least a day.

And my studying would have been interrupted.

With AI as an ally, questions get resolved instantly ⚡.

And that has meant I did not grind to a halt.

On top of that, I use it all the time to:

•create exercises

•suggest mini projects

•generate more practice

•experiment with new ideas

It is very useful and it has revolutionised a huge number of things, as everyone already knows.

But for me, when studying, it is an absolute TOP 🏆.

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😵‍💫 The agony of the tech student

Aside from all that reflection, I want to talk a little about the other side:

the emotional part of this road.

They prepare you to lower your expectations when it comes to job hunting:

“The road is hard.”

“The opportunity will come, but maybe not in the timeframe you want.”

“You have to persevere and keep going.”

And even though I understand it, internally that creates a strange mix of frustration and desperation in equal parts.

For my part, I am doing everything within my reach:

• I updated my CV… (how hard it is to write a good CV! 😫)

•I improved my LinkedIn profile… another titanic task

•I try to move, to show myself, to reach out

I feel that 99% of people are selling hot air.

An awful lot of hot air.

And I do not go along with that.

I know what I am capable of, but I do not know how to sell myself.

It is an eternal argument with myself.

I do not like posting, if I could be invisible I would be 🙈.

And even so, there you have me:

•contacting recruiters

•adding them

•sending CVs

•sending messages of interest

All so I can get into the tech world…

in a panic and embarrassed, but I do it anyway 💪.

Sometimes I feel the world is still a bit hostile at this point.

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💻 What we are already building

To wrap up a little and carry on with the bootcamp road:

We have already covered:

•creating APIs with Python

•FastAPI

•SQL and MongoDB

•password hashing

•securing things

•dependencies

And I have loved all of it 😍.

Everything I see fascinates me and hooks me.

I am on the home straight and I go through a lot of emotional ups and downs.

And I have to remind myself, every time I am heading straight for a collapse:

I am not weak.

I am just tired.

I am learning from scratch.

I am on the right path.

It is not easy…

and even less so with the background I have.

I just have to keep going and not die trying 💫.

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In the next post I will talk more about Angular 😉