My Experience At DevMountain

Overview

Web Development Bootcamps can be an effective and fast way to enter the Web Development world. They present a high-risk high reward situation and when paired with hard work, can bring almost instant success for aspiring web developers. I was once one of those aspiring developers that took this leap into a Bootcamp. For me it was one of the best decisions I've ever made and has sling-shotted me into my career years faster than a degree from a University. I hope that through sharing my story I can help others who are

Pre-Bootcamp

My first exposure to coding came when I was in High School. Although at the time they didn't offer coding classes at my school, I had a brother who was working on his Computer Science Degree at Utah State University. He told me about some free developing courses offered on Codecademy. I started on a couple of very basic HTML and JavaScript courses. They courses were fun and intriguing but I had my sights on a much different career path, becoming an Orthopedic Surgeon.

Although I wanted to go into medicine, my interest in coding was something that I couldn't completely ignore. And when I found out how many years of schooling I would need to complete in order to become a Surgeon, my desire to code only increased. It was around this time that I first heard of a Web Development Bootcamp. It sounded almost too good to be true. Boot camps weren't very proven at that point, and I had been told for so long that college is the best way to better yourself and get a good degree, so I didn't look too much into any bootcamps. Instead I enrolled in classes at Utah Valley University and took an Intro to Coding class my first semester. I don’t even remember now exactly what language we worked with in that class. Most of the class was focused on learning about computers and how the hardware, like the memory and stuff worked. Then we got into some very basic coding. I had a blast with all of it and by the end of the semester was ready to go all in with Computer Science.

After the semester ended, I paused school and went on a two year mission for The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints. While I was gone, I met lots of doctors and other medical professionals and my desire to pursue becoming a Surgeon was reignited. When I got home, I thought a little more about coding and looked a little bit more at some bootcamps in Utah. But I really wanted to pursue a medical profession, so again I didn't get very serious about looking into a bootcamp. I spent that summer shadowing different doctors and doing a lot of research about medical schools and what classes to take that Fall.

My first semester at UVU after my mission was all Pre-Med classes, it was one of the toughest semesters of school I have ever done. Even though I still thought that being a surgeon would be awesome, I knew for sure at that point that I wasn't cut out for it. So again, I turned back to what I had loved doing before and went back to work on a CS degree.

I enrolled in another coding class and regained my enjoyment and love of coding. Around this same time, I got a lot more serious about looking at and considering doing a bootcamp over the Summer. I narrowed my choices down to two different options. I talked a lot with my brother about what he had heard about each bootcamp, what reputation each one had, and how likely it would be that I could get a job upon completion of a bootcamp. I also did lots of research about the curriculum of each bootcamp and which one would give me a more marketable skillset. I toured both of bootcamps campuses and looked at the learning environment of each option. Ultimately for me, there was one clear choice about what the best option was.

Attending DevMountain

After all my research, I decided that DevMountain was the best place for me to go. It offered the most up to date curriculum and the most relevant technologies for what I wanted to do. I applied and was accepted for the Summer Cohort in February of 2019. In those months leading up to the bootcamp I did a decent amount of prework which included a CS class at UVU and some work on a Full Stack Web Development course on Udemy.com. It was a pretty nerve-racking couple of months knowing the financial obligation I had committed to and knowing that I needed to make sure that I was job ready when I completed the course. But mostly by that point, I was just ready to get to it and start!

Finally, on May 6, 2019 I started the Full Stack Web Development Immersive Course. It was kind of a surreal experience, and not what I really expected. I had expected it to be a super intense environment where people were frantically coding 24/7 and being lectured all the time. What I found out though is that it was quite the opposite. DevMountain does a great job of creating a super relaxed learning environment. Don't get me wrong, we definitely worked hard every day, but it was always a positive environment to be working in.

There are a few people that we worked closely with each day, our instructor and our mentors. The instructor was the one that led the lecture and did the main bulk of the teaching, they are developers that have worked professionally before. Then there were the mentors who were support to the instructor, they helped with setting up coding environments, debugging, answering questions, etc. The mentors were typically recently graduated DevMountain students. Although they didn't know as much as the instructors, they were still very skilled and knew what you were going through, thus being a huge help. They were key to helping me cement what I learned in my brain. This mostly is because the mentors were assigned specifically to our class so we spent all day every day with them. Our mentors and instructor were awesome and really helped me a lot. I owe a huge thanks to them for helping me to be where I am today.

Okay, now back to the Bootcamp. A typical day for me went as follows:

• 9:00 Arrive and start on the warm-up problem, led by a mentor.
• 10:00 Lecture with the instructor
• 12:30 Lunch
• 1:30 to 5:00 Afternoon projects (Mostly working on your own, with help from mentors as needed)

Of course, this changed sometimes depending on if we were working on any of our three projects. This structure was perfect for me though.

DevMountain also uses a few different types of work to help the students learn. They are:

Morning Warmups

These were typically a review from the day before or a preview for that day's learning. They were a great way to start each day.

Lectures

These were typically from the instructor and were long enough to cover a good amount of material, but short enough that it didn't allow for an overload of information. These were super important to our learning each day because all new material came in this way, we could see live examples, and ask questions about what we were learning.

Afternoon Projects

The real learning for me came in the afternoon projects. These projects were typically from a repository that we would get from DevMountain's GitHub Page. It would be an assignment based on whatever the lecture was about that day. It included work for us to complete and some built in tests, so we could know if we were doing it correctly. You were supposed to do these on your own if you could, get help from a classmate if you got stuck, and then your last resort was the mentors. These assignments were what really cemented the information we learned that day. During the lecture, we would often code along with the instructor, but during these assignments, we were able to try and sometimes fail to figure it out for ourselves. Each afternoon project was required to be finished before graduation, but often I completed many of them multiple times in order to really make sure I knew what I was doing for each topic.

Coding Challenges

There were just a few of these. These challenges were to be done completely on your own. They were timed (typically you got a whole day to work on each one) and you couldn't get help from classmates or mentors. Just your own brain, past assignments and anything you could find on the internet. These were mostly for the instructor to be able to see where each student was but were also a good self-measuring stick to know what I needed to work on more and what I was doing well with.

Projects

There were three projects that I completed while at DevMountain. Each got progressivly more complex and used the new skills that we head learned up to that point. The three projects were:

No DB

This project was pretty early on in the course. It was done after we had learned all the basics of HTML,CSS and React as well as the backend stuff like Node and Express. This app was just a simple app that could do full CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete), but didn't use a Database. This was a fun project that only took a couple of days to do. It was awesome to see how far I had come and what I could do already. It was also good to take all the pieces of knowledge and technologies we had learned up to that point and see how they really worked together.

Personal Project (Full Stack)

This was our first real experience working with everything from the front end to the DB. We had to completely plan out our apps with designs and app maps before we could work. It also was required that we useTrello to track our work. I built an app that was like a car fleet management system. It was pretty tough to do all of this in the time allotted, (I believe we only had a week of class time), so it meant a lot of hours at home working after school and many late nights. But it was so worth it to see this app come together. We presented these projects in front of all the students from the other cohorts. That was also a good experience to get to demo an app in front of people.

Group Project (Full Stack)

This is the capstone project of the whole course. It is a two week long project to make a whole full stack app. Everyone proposed an idea and then we voted on what our favorites were. The mentors split us into our groups based on our responses. The app my group made was similar to Spikeball's app, but it was for all sports. This was also very eye opening. During the personal project I could just do whatever I wanted and work on it in my own order. During this, a big part of the project became balancing what each person was working on and making sure that everyone's code worked together. Learning how to do Pull Requests and source control was also a big part of the project. We had a point where one of my team members accidentally pushed a private key to GitHub, so we had to spend a few hours figuring out how to fix that. Learning how to fix merge conflicts was another new thing that happened here. The pressure was high during this time because we had to have them completed in time to present them to the whole school on our final day of class in order to graduate. It again required many long days and nights of coding. One night we were even at the school until 2:00 AM. It was amazing to see how much we had learned though in just eleven short weeks. I had gone from knowing just a tiny bit about how code all worked together, to being the lead and helping create our own full stack app that was hosted and on the internet.

DevMountain also provided a lot of Job Prep as a main part of the curriculum. They have a person who is only there to help students and alumni find jobs and be ready for the job hunt. He came in and worked with us on our resume, LinkedIn profile, and personal website. At the time I created a quick website on Wix. He also talked about do's and don’ts of job hunting and interviewing. We did mock interviews with the mentors and practiced white boarding with the class. It was really nice to see that DevMountain wasn't only concerned about me coming to campus and paying them to take the class, but they also were concerned with helping me to change my life and find a good job once I was graduated.

After 13 quick weeks, I was finally finished with my Bootcamp experience. It went by so fast, but I learned so much. I didn't feel like a real developer yet, but I felt like I was finally ready to step into the development world and become a real developer.

Graduating and Post-Bootcamp Life

On August 2, 2019 I graduated from DevMountain. We presented our app to the school and our families and friends. It was an awesome day, one that I had been looking forward to for almost a year. But after presentations were over and that day was past, I knew the real challenge was here. I had to find a job.

That story is probably one that I will write a different post about, since a lot went into my search and I learned some good lessons from it. But after a job hunt of about 2 months, I got offered two jobs, and accepted an offer from MotivHealth Insurance Company. It was such an amazing feeling to accept a job as a developer, and it has been a dream come true to work since then. I've learned Angular and a few other technologies as well as continuing my education to get a degree in CS. My life will forever be changed because of those three months that I put everything else on hold and focused completely on coding to become a developer.

So, there it is, my experience at a Web Development Bootcamp. It was a crazy year or so leading up to going to DevMountain, and an exciting time while I was there. It was extremely difficult and pushed me in ways I never had been pushed before, but I came out with a skill that will benefit me forever.

Bootcamps aren't for everyone, that is for sure. But in my opinion, if you are looking for the best way to get into the Web Development world and are dedicated to making it happen, a Bootcamp is the best path to make it happen.