hey-another-one

This is very helpful and I'll take your advice here to heart! I think just the nudge I needed to be confident on a starter path. I'm happy to hear how effective Buildschool ended up being and that you guys are still delivering those awesome outcomes at Formation. Best of luck! 😄

There was a previous time (not too long ago!) that I was looking at learning to code and more specifically towards the Swift/iOS engineer route. There really wasn't a ton of bootcamps with a focus on iOS. It was and still looks like by far the majority of coding bootcamps, and just "learn to code!" online courses/materials/resources, is for front-end web dev. If I remember correctly, you ran a iOS bootcamp, Buildschool? It looks like what started there is what you're working on now with Formation (or maybe not directly related but at least the site redirects to Formation 😅). I couldn't work out the logistics on my end at the time because I'm in SoCal and believe Buildschool was in-person out of the Bay Area.

I still have an itch to learn programming by way of Swift because with that you can dive into iOS apps now but eventually I suppose even Apple's framework for AR when that medium rolls around. Was Buildschool getting people from a non-technical/no programming experience, essentially zero to junior-level iOS engineers in 16 weeks? Or was the application process there to filter for students with a technical background with some programming experience? Curious on this point, just so I can set realistic expectations of how quickly I can pick up something like iOS development to an employable junior-level competency - and not think I'm just totally not built for this skill if I don't hit that mark. I'm not great at math so I try to be honest with myself and assume there's a ceiling for me somewhere here compared to software engineers who get hired at FAANG.

On that note, is the Buildschool iOS program material available anywhere now for access/self-study? I'd love to set a personal goal in the coming summer months to learn. Are there any resources or courses you'd point a beginner trying to learn iOS dev like me towards? I've looked into it previously, but was quite overwhelmed at the time because I think there were whole newer courses that focus on teaching SwiftUI from the start, and I've seen other people say that's not a good approach because first principles should be learning to build UI programmatically/UIKit from the start? I've also seen people recommend to dive deep/spend months reading a book just on the language, Swift, to really understand the underlying programming language before diving into iOS development - is that a better approach for a beginner than say a resource that teaches Swift through teaching iOS dev in tandem?

Sorry for all the questions! I don't have a lot of connections in my personal life to software engineers or experience programming aside from writing Hello World in Python once(!), so just kind of piecing together the puzzle on my own.