The spoiler is that I'm currently taking a coding bootcamp with CareerFoundry. I started in March of this year and I've been enjoying it. I won't tell you what is the best solution for your situation, I'll just inform you why I chose a coding bootcamp against the self taught route. There seems to be a lot of misinformation when it comes to teaching your self code from stratch and the many pitfulls that an aspiring developer can fall into.

In the beginning I like many other aspiring software engineers wanted to learn coding so you get on youtube and try to find videos teaching you how to code. There was many videos I watched talking about comparisions of learning by yourself versus going to school or doing a coding bootcamp. The interesting commonality you'll find from graduates of a coding bootcamp is that they'll say they didn't need the bootcamp and they could of learned coding on their own. Many of these people had regret that they took the bootcamp in the first place since all the sources from the bootcamp were readily available online. The bootcamp graduate will then tell you that they tried the self taught route before they even jumped into the bootcamp and most often they ended up hitting a ceiling in their skill level or they just couldn't learn an aspect of software engineering.

As your navigating all this content and your hearing all these stories and they're telling you that they could of saved thousands of dollars not taking the bootcamp, i just want you to think about what they're actually telling you. The truth is teaching yourself code is extremely hard in 2023. You're fighting against a lot of barriers and many content creators create videos not to teach but to entertain you whilst saying it's a tutorial. This put you into the what's known as tutorial hell.

Tutorial Hell

Tutorial hell is a state where a person who's trying to learn code is watching youtube videos of people coding projects and coding along with them. They do this for awhile and then finally they go to create their own application from scratch and they don't know what to type. This is a very common situation in the software developer community. Many videos garner thousands and thousands of views showing people how to code projects without explaining why their using padding or why their importing components in react. These gaps of knowledge leave people hopeless as they find out the giant mountain they still have to climb. You're told you need to learn html, css, react, node, angular, git and github and more!

The Truth

You can 100% teach yourself coding with online resources and be amazing at it. It will be hard to navigate the information as its very vast and people have figured out ways to monetize teaching it without actually teaching it. You'll have to be very scrict on yourself to keep learning and there's no guarantee that you'll find all the right sources to learn and develop the skills for it. The reason I chose a coding bootcamp is because bootcamps are constantly revising their material and are maximizing the learning potential for students. There's bootcamps that have been around for years that have good ratings and are keeping track of how students are learning and how well their performing throughout the curriculum. They then improve it so future students can learn at a faster rate and actually develop the skills. This was the main reason I went with a bootcamp. CareerFoundry does project based learning, which has you complete little tasks of the project until the whole project is finished by you and you retain the skills. Another factor to consider and this was something i had issues with is when your self-teaching you end up going through material you don't need to learn. The bootcamps talor the information you need directly so you can succeed.