· 3 min read
How it all started
Short story about the beginning of my studies in kood/johvi
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It was April 2023, and I had been seeing that Kood/Jõhvi ad everywhere for months. At first, I thought it was just another online bootcamp, and I never really believed in those. I’m not sure why I opened the ad, but I’m glad I did. I read a little about the program, and it actually looked legit. The promise of becoming a software engineer in 18 months and a guaranteed job seemed too good to be true, so I asked around.
Everyone who had any experience with Kood/Jõhvi only had good things to say. So I figured, what do I have to lose, right?
Did I really get in?
After doing my research on Kood/Jõhvi and the people behind it, I decided to try out the online test, which was apparently in a gamified format—just like the rest of the program, as I later found out. I was told to go in unprepared, so naturally, I spent the first half of the day solving mind teasers.
When I finally got the courage to take the test, it was actually really fun, and I ended up getting a relatively high score. I thought, That’s it, I’m in. I’m 100% gonna be a software engineer now, and by the end of the year, I’ll be working at Wise or Bolt.
NOPE. All I had secured was a spot in an INTENSE three-week sprint. Whatever that meant.
Where’s your laptop? It’s already started
I made a couple of new friends on the way to Jõhvi, and they made it pretty clear that, without any relevant experience, I was in for a rough time. They were right. Especially in the first few days, which ended with us solving a murder mystery… through Bash? Who even thought of that?
And don’t even get me started on Git. `git push —force“ is always a good idea when you don’t even understand what Git is, right?
The funniest part, thinking back, is how the sprint actually started. We heard speeches from previous batches, school staff, and some founders. I’m not sure if I zoned out for a moment or if it was just meant to be that anticlimactic, but at some point, one of my friends just said, “Get your laptop out, the sprint has started.”
And that was it. About 10 minutes later, I had made my first-ever Git push, completely unaware of what was ahead of me.