Weeks 11-16 - The School Of Code Bootcamp

What we've learnt

• Web Sockets & socket.io
• Using a development server (ngrok)
• Web scraping
• To 'always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live'
• Form refactoring
• Form validation
• Firebase user authentication
• useReducer in more detail
• Recursion (functions that call themselves)
• DevOps and back end talk from the Economist
• Intro to AWS (S3, EC2, IAM Roles...)
• Docker & Containers
• Software development life cycle
• Gatsby
• TDD, BDD, decision tables
• Cucumber, Jenkins, Selenium & Cypress
• MongoDB & NoSQL intro
• GraphQL intro
• Progressive Web Apps
• Creating an NPM package
• Python intro
• Making an Alexa skill (we made a bootcamper randomiser!)
• SASS
• Figma
• My persona for user stories
• UI libraries for React (material UI & bootstrap)
• The twelve factor app
• Devops talk from PM Connect
• Intro to kubernetes
• Hyperautomation
• OAuth2 (during project build)
• AWS RDS & elastic beanstalk (during project build)

How I feel

Elated! We finished the School of Code bootcamp last week and I can't quite believe its over! During weeks 11-16 we had another couple of weeks of learning and then for the last 4 weeks Jodie, Mell and I formed team Jomellen and we built a Bootcamper Network App.

We decided to use React to build it mobile first as a PWA so we had one code base but so it had the flexibility to be used on all devices. We chose to use AWS RDS & elastic beanstalk with an express server for our backend as we wanted to challenge ourselves to learn more about AWS and I'm really glad we did. It was tricky at times but I really feel that I'm more prepared to use AWS in the real world now. We used firebase for authentication and we interfaced with the google maps api, a postcode convertor api and the meet up api (the OAuth2 process for this was longgggg but i'm glad we did it!). One of my smallest but most exciting little wins was using this beautiful little npm package to format our db timestamps for our messaging component into whatsapp style '2 mins ago' snippets - it was so easy and looked much better.

The code for our project can be found on my github - front end / back end.

On Thursday 14th May we presented our project for demo day. I was a bit gutted to have not experienced real demo day as it should have been - in front of an audience of roughly 100 possible employers - but it is what it is and it probably meant it was less nerve wracking. We'll save the post-demo-day celebrations for after lockdown! Every group worked so hard and did a brilliant job. If you'd like to watch our demo, it starts at around 16 mins into the video:

Where I'm at

Well, I've had a few days to relax after an intense 4 months. I've had a few lovely walks, lie ins and done some gardening and now I'm ready to get back to it! I want to build my portfolio and I think i'm going to use Gatsby as its quite like React but its for static sites and I'd like to learn a bit more about it. Before that though i'm going to finish a responsive css course that i'm half way through as I'd like my portfolio to be super responsive.

I'm also going to keep working on our Bootcamper Network App. I'd like for the forms to be a bit more beautiful and they need validation. We need to decide on a way for it to work so that only SoC bootcampers/staff can sign up to the app. We'd also like to build in push notifications and private messaging. Login via linkedin might be worth looking at too (we did originally want to do this but found out that there is a 2 week wait for applications and that wasn't ideal for a 4 week build!)

On top of the portfolio and sharpening up the bootcamper app I'd like to try some css artwork, i've seen a few tutorials online - i'd like to follow a few and then make my own css delights!

Where I want to be

I would like a job...soon if possible! I have every faith that Jack from Spinks and everyone at SoC are doing whatever they can to present what opportunities there are out there to us - it's just going to take longer than normally would do. I might need to find a job to tide me over in the mean time (slightly excited about the possibility of working in a giant amazon warehouse!) But I will be making sure my skills stay sharp so i'll be ready for any opportunity should it arise.

Thank you for reading my blog! If you have any questions about the bootcamp or my experience please send me a message!
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