A Postmortem on Bootcamp

Having recently made it out of a coding bootcamp alive, I think it’s about time to talk about the mentality that it takes to go through all of it. I graduated college a few years ago with a major in Game Design, so I had a decent grip of many technologies, as well as some experience in code. I decided to go into web development for a few reasons, and I figured that it’s about time to tell you how I made it through a tech bootcamp.

So first off, my mentality has changed since the beginning of the process. I started out as a completionist, wanting to do every possible lab and getting them 100% correct. That lasted about a month at best, and I did not learn at my best then. It got to the point where I would basically burn myself out by 8–9 at night, barely scrape through the concepts, sleep very little, and be thinking of code until my restless brain gave me my 5 hours of sleep. After that brief period of panic, I ended up repeating a module, so I figured that things needed to change for me.

I started working less at night, and focusing on teaching myself how to do things better. At this time, there was not much governance over the curriculum with repeat-status, so I was guiding myself through material that I didn’t understand. It took me about a week to get through the material that held me back, but I had no way of moving up from where I was. At that point, I just decided to build my own apps to an extent, ones that I might use. They might not have been fancy, but they taught me what I needed to know at the time.

When I was finally able to move on, the lessons became more feature-based rather than test-based, so I took to that in stride. Having been without a guide to what I made had given me ideas about how to do things in various ways, instead of hard-set boiler-plate information. I made it through to our final module on React without much of an issue, but then I began to struggle again. I had not used any class-based javascript prior, so the leap was pretty big for me. Figuring out how the new component structure worked took me more time than I cared to admit, but I was more than able to pass the module. Getting out there and just doing material in a guided way is what really got me through my misunderstanding of that, but there was something else. At first I was somewhat confident in my code, then I was held back and stopped having that confidence. At this point, I knew what I didn’t know instead of not knowing that, making this a “known unknown.” And knowing that made me want to really get better at what I did, for myself and for the sake of my projects.

My mentality shifted from places of full-hearted confidence to places of mental dread, and I ended up teaching myself how to learn again for something that actually matters to me. When the final project came around I never really took that in, and the following three weeks were a blur of work and learning Redux to augment my project. At that point, I would advise people to only do what is necessary to show off what you’ve learned; don’t learn something completely new. Recite, do not innovate. It was not meant to be a product for kickstarter, it was meant to show off what we could do. And that’s fine for what we’re looking for, no complete commercial-ready project should be completed by a solo developer in 3 weeks time after figuring out a framework for the first time. Even I you have something in mind, keep it light and polish what you can. If you have 3 weeks, make something in 2 and polish it for the 3rd. I was still fixing bugs the day of, and I regret that I operated that way.

All in all, I learned how to scope, work with others, deal with my own issues, and teach myself anything that I need to know at any given time. Bootcamp did wonders for me in all these regards, and that’s besides learning the actual languages I was working with that the time.

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