My bootcamp experience: Week 1

Wow...1 week finished and it's already better than expected!

I think the best way my brain can think to explain is to break it down into 3 sections:

• The Skeleton - the structure of the week
• The Muscles - what we covered
• The Outfit - the extra flares I didn't expect

So let's get into it...

The Skeleton

If you take a look at my pre-face blog (if you want to call it that), a big part of my reasoning for joining this specific bootcamp was because it was structured in such a way that it emulated a working environment. To that, I learned more about what that means as the week went on.

Outside of the first day (I'll get to that later), we start every day with "stand-up" at 9am. This is essentially a 15min update detailing where everyone is at with their current progress. To give a visual, we have an awesome sticky-note wall displaying all of our individual activities arranged to be in 1 of 4 columns; back-log (to be started), progress (currently working on), QA (quality assurance), and done (I think you get the point).

We have a couple of groups that have staggered stand-ups, so after my group is done I get 30 mins to continue working on my current task before we then have our first workshop of the day. We have 2 of these every day, both before lunch and they run about 45mins each (maybe longer depending on complexity of the topic).

Then it's lunch time, my favourite time of day!

After lunch, the afternoon is very much our own. We continue to work on our tasks, but can also go through workshops videos (they're all conveniently live streamed so we can reference back).

The only variance in daily routine is Monday and Friday where we have a team coding challenge using the Kodiri platform. Essentially we answer randomly generated questions on JavaScript, React, HTML or CSS, and we compete as a team against one-another. Also, Friday afternoons we have a retrospective where we discuss any particular challenges of the week or good points we want to highlight. These aren't necessarily coding related either, so it's nice to have your voice heard.

The Muscles

As you can imagine, day 1 is a lot of explaining of what to expect and setting up the logistics of the days ahead, but it didn't take long before we were in our first team coding challenge. Pace...I like good pace that challenges me, so this was very welcome to dive in to coding so early on.

From day 1 we also started our first individual app project. We are each building a Netflix-style interface (Kodflix). For this we have been given a set of tasks listed on github, each leading us to developing part of the app. It's really handy the way it's been laid out as on the Kodiri platform there are videos walking you through each challenge, however on the github task-list, there are other resources (e.g. documentation, stack overflow posts etc.) that are suggested to use with the videos as a last ditch attempt to solve the challenge if you haven't already.

In the workshops during the week, we covered different topics ranging from CSS/HTML through to introductory JSX inside of React. The workshops are very useful because they're interactive. Ricardo narrates and poses questions using guided discovery. Also, he is very pedantic about how we answer questions, for example if we want to describe an array and its contents, if we don't say "square brackets", he won't display the information in []. Although this may frustrate some people, I find it really good practice of getting used to terminology, and being able to express exactly what you mean without leaving room for interpretation.

As for non-Kodflix/workshop activity, we use the Kodiri platform for training. The platform is great as it has many different levels to work through questions with, and breaks down each language into many topics so you can focus on one specific area you want to improve on. I spent most of my first week tackling all beginner level JavaScript training and managed to teach myself quite a few new methods off of the back of it.

The Outfit

The biggest unexpected for me was the amount of time I spent at Kodiri this week. I don't think I left before 7pm on any day!

My main mentality throughout this bootcamp is to make the absolute most of it, and because I'm enjoying learning the languages so much, I just found myself staying late everyday continuing to either work on Kodflix, train, or build out my own project using what we'd learned so far.

Speaking of personal projects, I started to build out a landing page for a podcast I am a part of (The B-Side Word Podcast...shameless plug). This was just as a test of memory for what we had learned, and also to put the skills to a different test than the more structured environment of bootcamp activities.

I also met some really cool people! When you are self-taught, you're very isolated, but on the bootcamp I'm in a room with a bunch of passionate learners, a passionate couple of teachers, and on top of that, in the evenings I got to meet even more people attending either the evening cohort or meetup attendees. I'm a people person, so it was great adding a bunch of new faces to my database (coding joke...if that's a thing haha).

The last unexpected thing was probably something that happened in the gym...bear with me. I was in the squat rack, eyeing the bar seeing if it would flinch before I beat it up with my impressive legs (he said sarcastically), and the guy next to me chirped "you've got this!". Immediately a connection was born. I love an interactive gym goer that just motivates you for no reason. We ended up chatting and he was a really cool guy.

Fast-forward a couple days and there I am in the squat rack again and who walks up, the same guy! We get to chatting and he mentioned he missed the gym the day before because work ran late. I asked him what he did and of course, he was a developer. I immediately took his number and am grateful I now have a crossover friend interested in both coding and the gym!

Quick Summary

All-in-all, week 1 was a success and a blast! I'm loving the people I'm around and I'm learning at a much quicker rate than I was self-taught. I haven't had passion like this for something since I used to play basketball, so it's been really refreshing stepping into this world, and the bootcamp, so far, has been 100% the right decision for me.