We Happy Few, We Cohort of Coders

During week seven of Code Chrysalis I added a new continent, Asia, and a new technology, JavaScript, to my presenting list of accomplishments. As always, there are things I could do to improve this talk, but several of the people who attended were engaged and using the code I wrote to explore their Facebook data. I’ll call that a win.

I will try and add the examples from my talk to this blog in the near future, but the thing I will remember most about this talk is that all of my CC cohort stayed to listen to me give a talk they had already heard. In the moment I don’t beleive I gave them the thanks they deserved, but the longer I think about it the more amazed I am at their support. After a long day of working on a project together they all chose to stay rather than go home and relax. One of the other developers in the bootcamp agreed to be my assistant for the evening and I could not have asked for better help. He jumped up to add information to the white board so I didn’t have to flip back to an old slide and he helped me go around the room and answer questions after the talk. When I was done I got encouraging feedback from everyone, at least one high five, and one amazing classmate brought me a beer.

One of the aspects of the course I did not expect coming in was the feeling of camaraderie I would have with the men in my cohort (and we are all men, but that is a subject for another day). Maybe we just got lucky, but our group of six gets along very well. One of the attendees at the presentation mentioned that we all must feel as close as brothers after spending so much time together. And while we may not all feel like brothers quite yet, I do like the analogy.  Much like brothers, we don’t always agree or approach things exactly the same way, but we always have a mutual respect for each other. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, but we are all working towards the same goal. I don’t know if the closeness of our group will survive beyond graduation. I do know that for these twelve weeks there are exactly five people in the world who have shared this experience with me. For these twelve weeks we are sharing our struggles and our victories. We are sharing our knowledge and our wisdom. We are sharing our stories and often our meals. Sounds like a family to me. Maybe brothers is the right word.

I also did more coding with my brothers this week. We spent all day Monday working on an assessment of what we learned during the first six weeks and for the rest of the week we worked on a team project while simultaneously learning about Kafka, Redis, Passport and graphQL.

If you are interested in meeting my fellow software engineers at Code Chrysalis they will all be doing their own talk in the coming weeks

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