This is a follow up to a previous post where I reflected on certain things I disliked about Bloc or thought could be improved upon. Now for some of the aspects I’ve enjoyed! To someone like me who had no programming experience whatsoever, I’ve greatly enjoyed building the portfolio projects. Most checkpoints focus on building an aspect of a project, and it’s great to experience that sense of accomplishment when you can see something tangible that you added to a particular web app. For the most part, these projects are well thought out and contain a good deal of depth and time investment in order to complete. It’s easy though to get sucked into “just get it done mode” and not really learn though, so just a big warning there! I can easily see someone going through the checkpoints, copy and pasting the code into the editor, committing and pushing it, and moving on without grasping any of the concepts. For me, I would say I’m definitely not doing the later, but I do wish I was able to grasp and reproduce the code I see in the examples more quickly. Coding is difficult, and I have to remind myself not to rush it.

Another aspect I’ve enjoyed is the mentorship. A caveat to add here, this can be hit or miss sometimes. I’ve seen good and bad reviews on Bloc, and the main area of frustration for a lot of students is when they get a mentor who isn’t meshing well with them for a variety of reasons. My first and only mentor that I had through the front end portion of the curriculum was straight up awesome. I couldn’t have asked for anyone better. He was always available to answer questions. When he was busy helping other students and saw that I had messaged him, he would let me know that he would get back to me as soon as possible rather than me having to wonder if he got it or was just ignoring me. During our meetings he asked good questions and made it a point to make sure that I understood what I was doing. When I inevitably asked questions, he didn’t just give me the answer. He helped me understand what I was asking, and walked me through how he would solve something like this. I learned way more this way than just being told, “type this on line 35 and you’ll be good to go”.

Of course you know where this was leading to…when I moved on to the Ruby on Rails curriculum I had to change mentors because my current one only focused on font end. So on the flip side of this I’ve also had some bad experiences . I don’t want to get into details here because I want to stay positive, but to give an idea of what it was like, it was pretty much the opposite of my experience with my first mentor. The great thing about Bloc is that when I wrote an email to them discussing my concerns they were quick to turn course and give me a few recommendations on a new mentor. They even extended my program for a week to help make up for lost time. I would advocate that all Bloc students do this. If your mentor is not working with you, at the end of the day, you are paying for an education. Speak up! Is it worth it for you to “just tough it out” and grind to the end? I opted to do something and hope for a better outcome, and so far I couldn’t be happier!

One last thing is that I’ve enjoyed the assessments and quizzes that sprinkled in at various points. I wish there were more of them! The assessments are meant to simulate a job interview like environment. It is done online where an interviewer from Bloc you’ve never met before asks various technical questions to test your knowledge and also has you solve some coding challenges. Sure, these can be stressful and can be a real eye opener, but I’d rather experience that now than months down the road walk into an interview ill-prepared. The challenge with learning anything is figuring out how much you think you know vs how much you really know (and I guess also figuring out how much you should know). These assessments are little steps toward giving students a ballpark idea of where they stand.