You asked a lot but since this goal means so much to me, I'll do my best to answer. I don't believe rejected students would learn just as much outside the school as in. If this were the case, there would be no value at all in attending one.
1- Did you take, and become certified on any of those MOOC courses?
Yes, I did. Maybe I could have spent that time finding one more piece of contract work that would have let me raise the quality of my living conditions/diet, but I took the Berkeley SAAS course and I did very well.
2- Have you created anything of significance like a website?
I'm not talking about plugging up a WordPress Site without even
customizing the CSS, but something where you had to understand
the technology you were using, like hand-coding PHP and MySQL.
Do you have anything in github?
Possibly. I'm not sure how you define "of significance", and obviously I don't already posses expert level skills of I wouldn't be so interested in training.
I've made several JS tools, three 80s style games in flash, and most my projects that have been keeping me going have been WP customizations (generally a child theme with some PHP and a lot of CSS work). Check my profile and I'm sure you'll find one. Some of the above is on github, but nobody is forking it or anything.
3- What programming languages do you use? Have you attempted to learn
anything more special, like Scala or Lisp, or are you still mucking
around with whatever you began learning with?
I've dabbled in tons, including lisp, but not scala. I worked through part of Land of Lisp, though I did end up getting stuck at a point.
Yes, it will probably take a tad more convincing if you are older,
have no experience, and don't have any recent tough filters to prove
your abilities to them.
I find your general tone towards me a bit disheartening, to be perfectly honest. If the result of sharing any kind of personal set on HN is to be implicitly blamed by commenters, it's a lot harder to be open with people here. I'm not exactly sure why you would assume I have no experience or haven't done anything tough.
I've learned to speak and read Chinese well, built and run a business in Taiwan from 2006-2010 and got a job at a tech start-up in China 18 months ago with fewer skills than I have now! Yes, it has been a very, very hard time since moving back to the US this past 6 months, but I haven't exactly been a slacker.
The bar is set very high for these schools or they will go out of business,
so set the bar very high for yourself first, then apply. Don't blame
them for your age or your gender, because it is not likely that is what
is happening here.
First of all, I am not and have not blamed anyone. Every individual I've dealt with related these schools and most hiring managers and recruiters have been very polite and in many cases helpful. And you could be right-- maybe a woman with my skill set and background would have encountered every bit as much rejection from interviewers and schools that I have... and received the same sort of comments if she shared her failure on HN. The reason I don't like articles like this is that they make it difficult not to wonder.
Can you elaborate a bit on "setting the bar very high for myself" or offer something constructive? I'm a lot more interested in the "how to get in" than the "why you didn't" kinds of answers.
I didn't mean to come across as condescending or discouraging. In regards to my tone: that is how I am in general. I've had an extremely difficult life and sometimes the warts of that shows. I simply accept that things are tough and at the end of the day you have to fight through it. When I read your post, you sounded like someone who was discouraged and at least I offered a little bit of advice that may help you, so I'm not totally heartless yet. Hell, I wrote a very long response to you and I am doing it again, so please take the information and curse my tone to your computer.
I took issue with the apparent blaming of the schools for age and sex discrimination because I don't believe that's what happened at all. I believe, more than anything, blaming on a situation without objective proof is irresponsible.
I really don't know why you didn't get in or how to get in because I do not run these schools. With this thought alone, you'd see why I would be remiss to give any concrete advice to get in aside from work at getting better every day.
I'm hoping to be somewhat more encouraging than I sound because I am a 34 year-old-male who ran my first piece of Python code about a year and a half ago. Regardless of my financial situation, I am not the least bit discouraged. At some point I know I will be good enough to convince someone to give me a chance at $$ and that is all I need. At the end of the day, I just love jamming out code, but I don't love it enough to be homeless in SF while I attend a school.
You have an impressive background and I admire you. I think it's great that you are building sites for other people. I just looked through your profile as well but I'll refrain from giving any reviews. This is not because I don't think the work is bad, it's because this is already too long for a forum post.
In regards to "setting the bar very hard for yourself:"
I really hope you pick of Land Of Lisp again because from what I've read of the sample chapters and of the reviews, that book is quite entertaining and impressive. Maybe I'm used to looking at Lisp and doing mathy puzzles with code, but I'm having a difficult time believing that book is harder than the SAAS class. I think more than anything, grinding your way through something that is very difficult for you is impressive.
I also think you should create a site (or some major multi-technology project) from scratch. I'm saying no frameworks, nothing that writes any code for you. Obviously, XAMPP is okay, but I'm saying just you, a blank page, and your computer. There is something truly visceral about working beneath the abstractions, and yeah... creating your own abstractions and building it all by yourself.
I don't know what to say to you or anyone in regards to "set the bar very high," but I'll tell you what I've done:
Work through SICP. Trust me, saying I did that book gets nods of approvals and raised eyebrows from everyone. This book is very difficult but I managed to do 75% of the problems in the book, and it is well worth the effort. I don't know how many times I found an answer to an exercise then looked up from my computer and just sat their dazed at the concepts they revealed. Yes, these concepts are hidden in the solutions, so if you decide to try it, reading it is simply not good enough.
After doing most of SICP, I still wasn't sure how much I had actually learned, and to be honest, I wasn't sure I learned anything "valuable" at all. I built a website in Clojure + PostgreSQL to test my knowledge and I was very pleased to see all that I had learned and figured out without ever being exposed to odd concepts, especially routing. It felt really good and this experience taught me that although SICP didn't feel "real world," I learned more from it that I could have ever imagined. This is why I take issue from anyone who says CS education is worthless.
Corman's Introduction to Algorithms is on my to do list and the book is in the mail as we speak. I want to do this book in C because it somehow feels fitting to learn about foundations while working in a foundation programming language.
I've learned how to do higher-level math like proofs and calculus and I'm currently working through linear algebra.
I'm also going to finally dive back into learning CSS and I am going to learn to do it responsive style. Very few people can do it, and I honestly believe this will be cake after the torture I put myself through already.
I'll second the value of working all the way through SICP. I started and stopped with it several times before finishing it several years ago, and I learned _so_ much.
The SAAS course was more recent, so it's possible that Land of Lisp would be a lot easier for me than it was before. The "mathy" kinds of puzzles weren't a problem as I was a math major back in the day -- it was some kind of configuration issue. I remember having spent a lot of time googling and on message boards before turning my attention elsewhere. For the half of the book or so that I got through, it was really interesting. I still like how it eventually teaches you how to build a whole web server from the ground up.
It might be helpful to install VM with some Linux if you haven't done so. I'm not sure what the config issue was because I don't know much about Common Lisp, but I wouldn't doubt the issue was something irt to Windows if that is the environment you are using. You'll also discover that many items you want to use in your projects may not be available on Windows at all, and with Linux, you just do an install command and it just works.
I want to clarify that the reason things aren't available on Windows isn't because of some belief system from the Open Source community: it is because deploying for Windows is really tough.
As far as I know, it doesn't matter what distro you use. I went ahead and installed Arch Linux and I love it.
I've made several JS tools, three 80s style games in flash, and most my projects that have been keeping me going have been WP customizations (generally a child theme with some PHP and a lot of CSS work). Check my profile and I'm sure you'll find one. Some of the above is on github, but nobody is forking it or anything.
I've dabbled in tons, including lisp, but not scala. I worked through part of Land of Lisp, though I did end up getting stuck at a point. I find your general tone towards me a bit disheartening, to be perfectly honest. If the result of sharing any kind of personal set on HN is to be implicitly blamed by commenters, it's a lot harder to be open with people here. I'm not exactly sure why you would assume I have no experience or haven't done anything tough.I've learned to speak and read Chinese well, built and run a business in Taiwan from 2006-2010 and got a job at a tech start-up in China 18 months ago with fewer skills than I have now! Yes, it has been a very, very hard time since moving back to the US this past 6 months, but I haven't exactly been a slacker.
First of all, I am not and have not blamed anyone. Every individual I've dealt with related these schools and most hiring managers and recruiters have been very polite and in many cases helpful. And you could be right-- maybe a woman with my skill set and background would have encountered every bit as much rejection from interviewers and schools that I have... and received the same sort of comments if she shared her failure on HN. The reason I don't like articles like this is that they make it difficult not to wonder.Can you elaborate a bit on "setting the bar very high for myself" or offer something constructive? I'm a lot more interested in the "how to get in" than the "why you didn't" kinds of answers.