Hello World! If you’ve somehow stumbled onto this page, welcome to my totally cliched debut into the blogosphere. I’ll avoid the boring “this is what I’ll be blogging about” / “why you should care about my blog” stuff and talk instead about something that someone other than myself may (hopefully) find interesting, i.e. my first few weeks at Hack Reactor.
Hack Reactor?
If you don’t know what Hack Reactor is all about, you really should find out, because this place is incredible. I first found out about HR when looking into so-called “coding bootcamps.” While researching/comparing a ton of these organizations, I found that HR would consistently float to the top of the list in terms of quality. To date, I don’t think I have read or heard a single negative thing about the place. In fact, every single review or comment on the place seemed overwhelmingly positive. I initially thought this to be some marketing wizardry or the result of some other sort of suspicious online self-promotion, but the more I looked, the more weight these claims accumulated. My suspicion stayed with me up through the day I started the program, but having now struggled through the first two weeks of the curriculum, I can safely say that everything I read was 100% truth. This place really is the bee’s knees for those who want to break into the world of software engineering. And this is coming from someone who studied CS at a well-respected and very well-ranked university. In fact, it irks me that HR gets lumped into the category “coding bootcamp,” as this place to me feels like so much more than that label suggests. I haven’t attended any other of these bootcamps, but I have a hard time imagining any of them in the same league as this place (with a small number of possible exceptions).
The Curriculum
I’m not really at liberty to divulge any specific details of HR’s curriculum, and anyway if you want an overview of its content you’d be better served by their website or the many threads on Quora. What I can provide, is an analogy that may or may not elucidate the nature of HR’s curriculum and learning in general… The backdrop for my analogy is Frank Herbert’s excellent novel Destination Void, in which a crew of human clones carefully selected for their specific diversity of skills is sent on a deep space mission to colonize a distant exoplanet. Their ship is outfitted with a complex AI system built around an actual human. The AI system is the controlling force of the ship, maintaining its complex web of systems and making sure the ship’s payload (thousands of hybernating human clones) stays alive. The crew are simply caretakers whose roles are minimal in comparison to the ship’s AI… Or at least, that’s what the crew are led to believe. When the ship’s AI (and its backups) go mad and self-destruct, the reader discovers that the actual intent of the mission is to leverage the abilities of the crew to develop a fully stable artificial consciousness (a task never before accomplished) by placing the crew in an environment latent with programmed malfunctions and the constant threat of (potentially fatal) distasters… Now, imagine HR’s lecturers and other staff as the architects of such a mission, and the students as the crew of the ship. The goal is to leverage the students’ natural skillsets - by leading them through a series of challenges and intended frustrations - to produce excellent software engineers… Okay, maybe my situation isn’t quite so dramatic as the book, but many of the ideas do carry over. Working through HR’s curriculum can be a frustrating process, but that’s kind of the point. HR’s coursework has built-in gotchas (alongside the straight-up hard problems that you are working through) and a not-so-chronological ordering that at times seems counter-productive, but having emerged successful on the otherside proves to be the secret sauce of the process. True learning demands struggle. As evidence, just look at babies: they don’t read books on object permanence or attend “Crawling 101” lectures, they learn through repeated failure. As anyone whose ever debugged their way out of a segmentation fault or spent hours tweaking the css stylesheet for a website they’re working on will know, learning to program or effectively develop for the web requires much the same process. It’s often the difficulties of a task that we benefit from the most - they poke and prod the boundaries of our skillsets (and our patience), and slowly expand our capabilities and endurance.
Hack Reactor’s process works in contrast to the university norm, in which students sit through lectures, presumably absorbing all the information they need to complete exercises given later on. This method can be effective in the best case (given phenomenal teachers or some other exceptional quality), but on average produces minimal returns (see research on “flipped classrooms” vs. the traditional education model). I can feel the effort and thought that the HR staff has put into their curriculum. It works its magic on me every day I’m there. I have complete confidence that I’ll come out of this ready to compete for some of the best software engineering jobs out there.
The Culture
Besides the curriculum, the other huge thing that HR has got going for it is the culture. I’ve never worked in a more inspiring, positive, all-around amazing environment in my life. The staff here truly go above and beyond, and as a student you are truly in good company. Everyone here is a joy to be around and I couldn’t be happier with my cohort… That’s all I will say about the culture here, as it really is something that needs to be experienced.
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The past two weeks have gone by at a blistering speed. I’ve had an incredible time and look forward to the next 11 weeks of the program (solo week included). I only wish that time would stop moving so quickly so I could savor my time here a little more, but I suppose that’s just the way it is around here…
