Why I joined a Bootcamp

So the coding bootcamp got me over the line getting my first role within software development. I had been trying for months with no success and was at a bit of a loss on what to try. My money was running out and I was facing the prospect of having to go back to the drawing board and pick up an odd job in the meantime.

It was only when my parents suggested doing a bootcamp and showed me one that I would be eligible for. It would mean studying for a further 4 months but, at this point, I was prepared to do anything. I took the entry exam and passed. Admittedly my months of learning by myself had paid off and meant I was at an advantage compared to someone who was applying from a position of not knowing any coding whatsoever.

There are a few key benefits from being on a bootcamp:

• You are coding full time every day
• You have mentors/teachers who you can review your code with you
• You pair program with others and also work in groups

These were key for me as I'd spent months coding by myself and relying on forums/discords to get answers to my questions which takes significantly longer. My advice to anyone starting to code who isn't on a bootcamp is to either get on one, or find somebody already in the industry to mentor them. There's nothing worse than getting stuck and not having anybody you can turn to for some guidance.

The Bootcamp

The bootcamp itself was split into four 3-week sections: Foundation, back-end, frontend, and a group project. Foundation was challenging but manageable given that I'd already spent a significant amount of time learning JavaScript.

It was only when we got to backend that I began to encounter concepts I was completely unfamiliar with. This was when working with others helped as I worked with a couple of other students who had a better grasp than I did at the time, which helped on the exercises. It was also in this section when we created our first project, which in this case, was an API like the one used on a site like Reddit. The exercises we'd done up to this point set us up well and meant I could crack on with the the project and finish the week. The project itself was in Node.js and also used Express and postgres for the database.

We then moved onto frontend which I felt pretty comfortable with as it I'd done a fair amount of frontend already. This part would also teach us the popular JS framework React which I'd also done a few tutorials in. The weeks whizzed by and before I knew it we were building a UI for the API we'd built in the previous section. I also really enjoyed this project week but wished I had built my site using a framework as it makes projects look more professional.

Lastly came the group project which involved working with others to come up with an app of our choosing. In the end we settled for a gig finding app where users could find gigs as well as set up their own. The project also encouraged us to use new technologies that we wanted to try. We decided to use React Native with TypeScript, as well as AWS across our backend. The group project was definitely the most challenging part but we managed to put it all together in the end and present it to students and teachers alike. By this point I'd been applying to tech companies like a madman and had got through several interview rounds with a startup looking for a junior developer and on the week that I finished the course they offered me a job! From deciding I wanted a job in development in October 2020 it took me around a year and 4 months to bring that vision to fruition. I'm convinced that someone with the right guidance could have gotten there a lot quicker than I did.

In Conclusion

Going on this path was one of the best things I ever did and was also far from easy. There was plenty of times when I felt like giving up but then anything worth doing is going to be hard.