Another Chapter Finished

#programming #webdev #beginners

The 16 weeks in the bootcamp flew by in a blink of the eye. Priceless friendships were made and unforgettable memories were created. Wow, I'll never forget sitting through those lab hours debugging with my classmates, or the countless of inside jokes curated over the weeks together.

It was the friends that met each other starting day 1 of programming basics, when the instructor first went over what an IDE and a variable is. It was also the friends who joined our journey along the way as we crossed each benchmark - Web fundamentals, Python, MERN, and finally finishing with Java or C#. Watching my new close friends go from asking questions about what scope is to handling API requests with Spring, the adventure we went through together was proof of how much the bootcamp teaches developers and how much a determined software engineer could learn in such a short period of time when given the right motivation and guidance.

Though going through the bootcamp might not have been the best choice for "someone like me" if you were looking from the outside in, I would choose to enroll into another bootcamp for a different discipline, if given the chance. Bootcamps just like CodingDojo are a success and deliver top tier software engineers through the different approach in teaching methods. Class sizes are smaller. Curriculum is ALL hands-on project based assignments where students are forced to apply the knowledge right after being shown new concepts. Morning algorithms and the 20-minute rule force students to work together and practice collaborative skills while problem solving. Lab hours help students navigate assignments and group study, teaches students to debug and read each other's code. Projects encourage pair programming. Overall, the environment that a bootcamp, even an online one, provides naturally forces students to learn more necessary skills that the traditional school system neglects in classrooms - skills the industry requires in the workforce.

And, because of that, I know there won't be a day that goes by where I'm not grateful for the experiences and the lessons I learned during my time at CodinDojo. Though bootcamps are more stressful than university, the payoff is just as more rewarding. Looking back over the 16 weeks I spent in the bootcamp, the week I went to PyCon US 2023 in Salt Lake and the week I visited Fort Worth, Texas....wow.

I went into the bootcamp as a front-end web developer and came out as a full-stack web developer. The bootcamp not only honed my Javascript skills, enhanced my understanding in Python and Java, and deepened my understanding in React, I learned MySQL, Spring, MongoDB, and Flask. I learned new ways to explain both basic and complex concepts to new developers, different perspectives and approaches to programming, and many new skills needed when networking, especially in the tech industry.

If you are standing where I once was - five years ago, three years ago, or just five months ago - questioning whether going through a coding bootcamp is going to be worth it, whether it was "too good to be true", whether it was x, y, z. Jump. There's financial aid. There's a deferment plan, where you don't have to pay until three months after you've graduated.