My Coding Bootcamp Experience
April 05, 2018
Welcome to my first post!
I would like to share with you all my experience of attending a coding bootcamp and why I decided on going to one in the first place. This might help if you have been considering an intensive coding bootcamp vs. learning code on your own. I will discuss the pros and cons of both and my day to day schedule while attending the course.To start things off, I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed my time while at my coding bootcamp and it was an overall positive experience. Although not entirely perfect (will talk about that later in the article) it was nonetheless a valuable experience and there are coding schools out there that should be completely avoided!!
Learn code alone vs. attend coding bootcamp
I would highly recommend attending a coding course if you are someone like me who was struggling to learn code alone. That is not to say that it isn’t possible to be self taught, i’ve heard of many people (from reading other blog posts and news articles) about successful people teaching themselves code and going off to work at top companies such as Microsoft, Google, or Apple. But for me, I fare better from learning in a class with a tried and tested curriculum and having other students to program with and learn from. I 100% believe that these coding bootcamps are doing so well because of students having each other to pick up the curriculum together and to pair program with. This interactive learning environment helps immensely in engraining the difficult topics discussed during the lectures.
Another reason as to why I found it difficult to learn on my own is that although there are many resources out there (most free of charge) I was trying to learn too many things at once without really gaining a solid foundation in a single programming language, rather, I was trying to learn JavaScript for a few weeks and then jumping to Python or Ruby and trying to build an app using one of those. It is difficult for someone new to programming to choose the right tools needed to build a full stack application. It is highly beneficial for a beginner to stick with a single stack (If you do not know what a programming stack is: A programming stack is a bundle of software used by a programmer to build a site or application with each stack having different use cases) whether that is with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), MEAN (MongoDB, Express, Angular, NodeJS), or any other stack used on a project.
Once you can master building in a single stack then you should be able to move to other programming languages and frameworks as at that point you will have taught yourself as a programmer to continuously learn and improve on your software development skills. A very important trade in this industry!
The Coding Bootcamp I attended and why
I ultimately decided on attending Ironhack in Miami after debating for a few months which web development school would be best for me. I considered all of the top programs such as Hack Reactor, App Academy, and a few others out in California. Ironhack Miami made the most sense to me based on student reviews (rating as one the highest on course report and switchup) and I was already living in the South Florida area. It also made sense that I would not be competing for a job with all of the new computer science graduates from top universities in California. Also, the tech ecosystem in Miami is growing at a fast rate and I want to be a part of the thriving industry here in South Florida.Ironhack was a really great experience and having graduated only last week, I am feeling very optimistic on the opportunities available and i’ve already landed a freelance project. This course is intense. It is only 9 weeks compared to the average of 12 weeks for other coding bootcamps. Students are required to keep up with the pace, you should definitely have some coding experience (self learning from code school or code academy) prior to attending. You will have to put in a lot of time and effort especially on the weekends to grasp the material. It’s important to make sure that web development is something you are serious about and have a passion for! The more code experience you have prior to attending your cohort will help immensely as the course progresses to the more difficult topics. There is also mandatory pre-work that will help as you start the first week covering the basic fundamentals of HTML5, CSS3, and basic JavaScript. Ironhack’s curriculum covered the MEAN stack for building web applications.
Module 1:
- JavaScript fundamentals
- CSS + Responsive web design
- Advanced JS Topics/ Dom Manipulation
- jQuery
Module 2:
- NodeJS
- ES6 Advanced
- MongoDB & Querying
- Express
- Mongoose
- Authentication / Encryption
- Axios
- Deployment
Module 3:
- TypeScript
- Angular2 Intro
- Components
- Data Binding
- Services & Routing
- Backend/ Frontend Integration
(I had a lot of fun building out all of these applications and will keep iterating on them in the future!)
Daily Schedule While at a Coding Bootcamp
6:00 AM:- Wake up
- shower
- morning coffee
- review course material that will be covered for the day
- Practice problems and look over previous days exercises
- Discuss with other students about course work
- Class begins with 1 hour lecture
- 15 Minute break
- Have a snack before next lecture
- Pair programming exercise for the day
- Lunch Break
- Next hour lecture begins
- Begin individual exercise course work (These were tricky!)
- You will have TAs help during this time
- Final Hour lecture for the day
- Complete individual exercise course work
- Complete pair programming exercise if not completed
- Head home & make dinner
- Continue with exercises (As stated, some of these were tricky and took a while)
- start reviewing ahead course material that will be covered the following day
- Sleep and get ready for another full day of code!
Final Thoughts
Attending a coding school should not be taken lightly, you'll certainly be investing a lot of time and money into one so it definitely helps to make sure that this is something you want in order to get your ROI. There are a lot of moving parts in programming and things can get frustrating. Code is definitely not easy, but can be very rewarding solving complex problems. It's important to continue pushing to GitHub and programming even after completing a course, software changes at an alarming rate you've got to keep up! I am still learning new things everyday. I just picked up the book series "You don't know JS" By Kyle Simpson and i'm finding it very interesting. I hope you enjoyed my first post, I will be adding more technical ones in the future that'll include code and examples.Personal blog by Alex Virdee, 