Day 71

CodingDojo Review and Future Plans

To sum up the bootcamp:

• 14 weeks of learning
• First 2 weeks are web fundamentals and are off-site
• 12 weeks of on-site instructions
• Python Stack -> MEAN Stack -> iOS Stack
• Earned red belt and 2 black belts

I think this bootcamp really tested me in two ways: how do learn things by myself and how to maintain motivation to fix a problem through an extended amount of time. The bootcamp is by no means a sprint, but a fast-paced marathon. There were times that I felt really burned out (2nd stack), there were times where I felt extremely frustrated at basic mistakes that I was making that broke my code. But I came out of this program a much more careful programmer. I started the program with some knowledge of CS but it put me to the test by hours upon hours of homework assignments. I had an issue of writing code to quickly and not being careful, therefore leading to syntax errors that gave me pretty ambiguous debug error as well as not knowing how to debug my code by myself. As an engineer, your job is to find solutions by yourself. This required a lot of patience and confidence on my part.

For me, when I ran into a problem I couldn't instantly fix in 1 minute, I would ask my instructor. Kris, my Python and MEAN instructor would look at my code and then walk away without giving me the answer. And I'm very thankful for that because it taught me to be patient with my work and to dissect my code so I know it intimately and how all the moving parts work together. By the 2nd stack, I had very few syntax errors and the ones I would get, I would know where to look for them. By the end of the bootcamp, I had the confidence to debug my code although I would not always be able to do it quickly but that comes with time and many more mistakes.

Now everything wasn't perfect. I didn't like how we only had 1 day to work on our project in our Python stack because of the Thanksgiving break. And for our MEAN Stack, we didn't have one at all because of the holiday break. Of course we can work on the project outside of the Dojo but collaborating with team members are hard when we don't have time to discuss what we want to do in person. The learning platform as well has its fair share of issues with the iOS platform having some outdated code. But, that might be their way of having to rely on yourself to read online the documentations to understand what is happening.

Their goal of creating "self sufficient developers" hold true. I can now make projects by myself and although I might not know off the bat how to do everything, I know how to learn everything that I need to, to make the project work. What I've taken away from the Dojo is that I really only scratched the surface of a vast ocean of knowledge. Was it worth the 12 grand? I think the long run yes, because I am confident that I will be able to find a high paying job. But that's because I put in 60-70 hours a week. 

This bootcamp isn't for slackers. You can suck at coding but you need to have the work ethic and patience to make mistakes and learn from them. So for any potential students, I would say this: any bootcamp you go into is gonna be a lot of work. If you're here to get the same jobs a full CS degree students apply for, you need to know just as much if not more since you won't have a degree to fall back on to get you interviews. Be prepared to work hard, be prepared to be very frustrated at your code, be prepared to feel overwhelmed, be prepared to feel mentally exhausted. But also be prepared to learn a lot, and be prepared to gain new confidence and skills as an engineer, as well as using words that you didn't even know the meaning of in the beginning of this and be prepared for the elation when your create a robust and cool application from scratch.

Future plans? Going to be a resident at the Dojo, working on my projects to show employers. They have a resume/career bootcamp afterwards too so we'll see how it goes!