A Little Bit About Me

Hello world! A few months ago I decided that I needed a career change because I didn’t want to be in the healthcare field anymore. Not that I didn’t like helping others or interacting with patients… I didn’t have any contact with patients. I sat in a cubicle all day by myself. I decided that I needed to do something about it instead of coming home and complaining.

My husband actually received a new job offer at this point in time and it relocated us to Texas. We figured that this would be a good opportunity for me to start learning front-end web development. Now, this wouldn’t be the first time that I started looking into web development. In 2014, I googled “Free coding resources”, which brought me to CodeAcademy.com. The very first website that I learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I was grasping on to HTML and CSS, but when I got to JavaScript I wasn’t retaining anything. After a couple weeks I decided that I wouldn’t get the hang of this, so I quit. In the next couple of years I always went and looked for free resources, but when I got to the JavaScript I couldn’t grasp it.

How I Decided To Start With Treehouse

Which now brings me to Treehouse. When I did all of my google searches and looked through forums, the top recommended site was Treehouse. Everyone said they had a great experience and would highly recommend it for ‘newbies’. The reason I never tried Treehouse from the beginning is that it wasn’t free. Everyone told me:

“You don’t have to pay to learn, just find something free”

and I listened to them. So when I decided I was definitely going to try and learn Front End Web Development- I knew Treehouse is where I wanted to learn from.

What I didn’t know about Treehouse was that they came out with a tech degree program. There isn’t a lot of feedback regarding the tech degree program other than their website, so I decided to do a little research. I found a couple Medium posts, but nothing that convinced me… until I found a YouTube video.

Update: Unfortunately, Skyedevelops YouTube channel is no longer active.

In the video, she went through her experience the first day, first week, and first month. After seeing her reaction and how it made her feel, I decided I was going to do it!

Treehouse Tech Degree

The cool thing about Treehouse is that they offer a free trial for a week. This gives you an opportunity to go through the courses before deciding to fully commit. They have four different Tech Degrees — Front-End Web Development, Full Stack JavaScript, Python Web Development, and iOS Development.

The tech degree is $199 per month, which seems like a lot, but I believe it’s extremely worth the investment. You can learn at your own pace and at home, which was a big plus for me as I work remotely with my healthcare job. The minimum amount of time to finish the tech degree is 3 months, but the maximum is unlimited. The reason the minimum is 3 months is that you can only submit one project per week.

What is included in the tech degree? You get access to full course videos, quizzes, coding challenges, 12 projects, Slack channel, final exam, and the certification. The full course videos, quizzes, and coding challenges are included in the $25 basic plan.

Team Treehouse Tech Degree

My Experience

I started the FEWD tech degree in the middle of September. I should tell you that at that point in time, I was working full time in the medical field and trying to stay on top of my schedule by submitting a project each week.

I won’t go into full detail about each project, but these are the skills you will learn — HTML, CSS, Sass, JavaScript, JQuery, and React. I noticed that some of the projects were fairly easy, but that was because I had a good understanding of those skills needed for certain projects. There were two projects that I struggled with — Sass and React. I could not stress this enough — you will always be learning new skills and things are constantly changing. There will be some challenges along the way, but I suggest pushing through it.

Treehouse has a Slack channel for each tech degree. The main use for the channel is to speak with other students — whether it is about a project you need help on, want a project reviewed, or if you just want to chat with other students. After passing my third project, I decided to see if I could use my knowledge and help other students. I was constantly replying to other students — reviewing their projects or helping them debug their code. This helped me retain things that I might have forgotten or haven’t even learned yet.

Treehouse also allows students to do peer reviews. They have a rubric that the student needs to follow before submitting their project. The peer reviewer will follow the rubric when grading and either give the student a needs work, meets expectations, or exceeds expectations grade. You are only allowed to review a project you have completed and passed. As I mentioned earlier, regarding the Slack informal project reviews, it helps you retain what you’ve learned. You might even find new ways of doing things!

MY TOTAL PEER REVIEWS: 118

I took the final exam on January 26th and passed! I finished the tech degree in a little over 4 months and spent a total of $800 for my tech degree. I 100% believe that it is definitely worth it. I’ve tried plenty of free resources to try and learn FEWD and could never get past JavaScript. Within the first week of Treehouse, I had already felt confident and knew I could accomplish my goal.

What Now?

Career

As I mentioned earlier, I have been very active in the FEWD Treehouse Slack and reviewing students projects. I was contacted by Treehouse once I graduated and given a contractor position as a Slack Moderator & Code Reviewer. I answer questions students have in Slack, help debug student’s code, review student’s projects, etc. It was definitely a goal of mine to work with Treehouse and I am ecstatic to be able to cross that goal off.

Networking

I regularly attend meetups to get my name out there, meet other developers, and learn new things. I am actually giving a lightning talk for Women Who Code in Dallas in the next couple weeks.

Summary

If you know you want to become a developer, but aren’t sure what area to choose from — I would recommend doing the free trial. You could also start off with the basic plan ($25) and then switch over to the tech degree. Also, if you start a tech degree, but decided you want to do another tech degree, you can switch at any time to the new one. I believe it is 100% worth trying. I was going to teach myself, but I think their content is excellent and easy to comprehend. Oh, and if you are worried about the job outcome, don’t be. I’ve seen students in the middle of their tech degree find jobs. You just need to make sure you are using your skills and creating web applications that make you stand out from others.

Written by Haley Ward who lives and works in Indianapolis - building useful things.