CODE

When I first saw a terminal window populated with data I felt tiny, confused, and intimidated. As if I was a stick man confronted with a wall of incomprehensible letters and numbers.

Having built some complicated excel spreadsheets designed to track and run calcs on commodities futures contracts, I knew I needed something more powerful to truly dig down into the data. However, every time I set eyes on computer code my stomach churned. Plus, I had always assumed I was simply not smart enough to code. That stuff was for savants and people with Aspergers or something.

Taking The Plunge

My first dive into coding came about a year ago when I was between jobs and needed something productive to do. I signed up with Code Avengers because their layout actually looked inviting rather than intimidating. After a few courses, and success at making a turtle draw circles and squares I realized this was doable.

From talking to some people that work at Quant Trading houses I learned that they were all using the R programming language to mine their data and build their trading strategies. That led me to Datacamp and their tutorials on R, which are excellent. Despite their excellence, I got a bit demoralized, because R is a bit more complex, especially trying to decipher the documentation on CRAN. I persevered and made it through 5 of their R courses and have begun to create things in R. One thing nagged at me though. I realized I needed someone to teach me to THINK like a programmer. I needed a fundamental base in how programmers think in order to properly make use of the R language. Or any language for that matter...

Hit Me With The Firehose

How to learn? Well, first I had to accept the reality of my situation. I have two kids under the age of 3, so going off to a secluded bootcamp for two months, leaving my wife to fend for herself, was not an option. Fortunately, the coding bootcamps have moved online, and their functionality is exceptional. I visited Course Report and started sifting through all of the reviews. It took me a few days to narrow the field down to just a couple players. When I realized that I wanted to both learn how a programmer thinks as well as learn how to build programs, and that from there learning R would be much easier, I was able to make a decision.

The Firehose Project won the day with it's killer combo of:

• Two week free trial
• Rolling start date (basically every Monday), meaning I could start right away
• Price! At USD $ 7,000 it was on the lower-middle range
• 6 month course duration was not too long or too short...25 hours per week was juuust right
• One-on-one mentorship with professional Software Engineer
• Multiple payment options sealed the deal

4 Weeks In

Now 4 weeks into the course, I am happy to report that I have created my own profile page, my first app, and am on my way to producing a Yelp! clone. The people behind Firehose are clearly passionate and have given a lot of thought to what they are trying to do. I am continually impressed with how they layer on the knowledge and then throw you a challenge to reinforce what you just went over.

Plus...I am having fun.

Hot Damn!