Bootcamp! My experience - Part 2 (Fundamentals)

Cal Costanza — Sat, 15 May 2021 12:59:58 +0000

The excitement of passing the entry challenge and knowing that there is a date set to when everything will start was huge! I was given 3 weeks’ worth of pre-course material where it was mainly more katas to make sure I keep my learning, problem solving and logical thinking going. Some bits included learning how to use the terminal to start navigating through your files without using the operating systems UI. It’s that scary black box that IT people most of the times open up when there is an issue with your work computer and start typing letters in that don’t make sense to you. Little I knew, soon this became my most used tool when working on code and no longer is this scary thing I’ve never wanted to use.

During this time, I was able to connect with some fellow students and actually start new friendships. We talked about the logic behind our solutions of katas, shared tools and methods we had picked up and sometimes it was just nice to share the frustration about a challenge that was just too difficult to resolve at this stage. The most rewarding parts were when you were able to help someone get to the solution themselves by just giving little pointers or leading them to the answer.

Intro Week: The first week was basically an introduction to programming, where we went through most of the things we had learned already throughout the process of learning JavaScript and the pre-course material. We started talking about the logic of the whole programming world. How things work, why they work this way etc. All this new information just felt like it unlocked further knowledge and understanding as to what we’re typing and why some things work the way they do. Just think of a programming language as a way to communicate with a computer by giving it instructions. Depending on what you write the computer will execute your instructions. Computers think in 1s and 0s (binary) but programming languages are basically a language easier for us to read and write and then translated into binary code which simplifies our communication between us and the computer.

Week 2-4 - Fundamentals: During these weeks things got real very quickly. We got more into depth of the various methods we use in programming and started to apply those in Javascript. Here is also where Pair Programming became almost a daily thing. We are basically paired with a fellow student and work together on mini projects or challenges.
This was another great way of getting to know the rest of the colleagues but more importantly work together, share knowledge and bounce off ideas. Very often you have the solution right in front of you but you just can’t see it. Here is where pair programming comes in, by communicating what your thoughts are and just saying them out load you often get a step closer if not to solution itself. Let me just say, the feeling is just amazing when that light bulb goes on and you get to a solution together.
So we’re writing a lot of code but who can tell us if it’s right or wrong and if it does what we want it to do? Here is where TDD (Test driven development) comes in. Pretty early in this section we’ve learned how to test our code. This helped identifying issues and potential flaws in what we’ve written. It’s also a great way of thinking about the solution step by step and start from the smallest and easiest way of passing a test to the more complex way which then will pass all of the tests. Personally, during this part of the course Closures were basically the most difficult bit to understand at first. Just think of the movie Inception, a dream within a dream. This is basically a function within a function with access to the information from the function above and being able to manipulate information within. Possibly the worst explanation ever but I’ll leave you with a link if you’re interested in checking this out (Closures).

By the end of these 3 weeks the confidence level had increased massively. We had gone through, Testing, Values VS references, classes, recursion, closure, promises etc.
The tutors are always there to support and listen to you when you feel low and you feel like things aren’t sticking in your head. Everyone takes their time go over the topic again until you fully understood. I always get the feeling that everyone believes in you and you know the answers. You just need a little push sometimes. When I look back and think about where I started and where I was at this point (4 weeks in). I had learned so much in such a short time and the learning was not going to stop here. There was more to come after we had covered the fundamentals. This is also where I started to think about, what if I wouldn’t have joined this bootcamp? Would I have learned all of this so quickly? Would I have known what to learn first? I put myself back to where I started and asked myself all these things.
Which is also a reason why I started this blog, I wanted to share my journey and give you my personal experience about joining a bootcamp and my thoughts on if it was the right thing to do or could I have learned all of this on my own?

I will go through all this in the next part. In the meantime if you have questions or want me to talk about something specific please let me know.

Bootcamp! My experience - Part 1 (Intro)

Cal Costanza — Thu, 06 May 2021 17:37:51 +0000

First of all, let’s start with a little bit about me.
I'm Cal (Calogero), I'm a 34-year-old passionate about tech, solving problems and love learning new stuff. For the past 9 years, I have worked for a major travel company and decided in 2020 that it was time to do something I've always been curious about, coding.

Prior to that I had no knowledge about software development, no seriously… I had no clue. I didn’t even know where to start. I had done a little bit of html about 13 years ago but that’s it. I also didn’t know that many people who had a developer job which could have helped me to get on the right path faster. However, we all know someone that has the answers to everything (well, almost everything). That’s right, Google.
I started my research about software developer roles and I was faced with hundreds of different programming languages and tools that developers use on a daily basis.
The confusion level had increased so much that I started looking for apps and courses I could use to figure out if I even liked it.

At that point, I had downloaded Mimo and Codecademy and started my coding journey. Most of these apps seem to start with HTML and CSS. Which was great! I love being creative and I love visuals, let’s do this! I quickly fell in love with the fact that I was able to create something with simple code. Weeks after, I knew that this is what I wanted to do for a living. Every time I opened my apps I was so happy to learn something new. I knew I couldn’t do this while working full-time. I wanted to be fully committed into learning how to code. I then decided to leave my job in the middle of a pandemic.
Crazy, right? Yes, crazy about coding.
At this point I wanted to do a real course, something where I could interact with people, ask questions, share ideas and be part of a team. I continued researching and I was soon faced with another obstacle… Which course do I choose?
I spent so many hours doing research and found so many negative reviews I didn’t feel like I wanted to make a choice. I started wondering, which one is genuine? Do they just want my money? Will they forget about me once I have paid them?
I then decided to speak to a careers coach. The person I spoke to knew someone that had previously worked as a careers coach at one of these bootcamps (“I always say everything happens for a reason”). She immediately got in touch with them and a few days later I received an email of them telling me about 2 bootcamps she knew had good reputation. One of which I had heard of before and found some not so positive reviews of and the other one was Northcoders. How could I have not seen these guys before? First thing… let’s find some reviews! Wow! Every review I found was talking about how supportive they were, lots of praise to the tutors and the overall positive feel of the bootcamp.

On the same day I got in touch and was told I had to learn javascript (which is a programming language) and pass an entry challenge in order to get into the bootcamp.
Let the learning continue! After 2 weeks of non stop freecodecamp I was able to write some basic code and resolve some katas (katas are challenges where you write code to resolve a problem or get to the expected result). I never had so much fun! I was loving it!
I then started joining their weekly sessions where one could bring some more challenging katas and a tutor would coach you to get to the answer yourself or with the help of other people who also wanted to join the bootcamp. This was possibly the bit where I was able to learn the most before doing my entry challenge. The tutors took their time to explain and go through how and why but not without you getting to the solution first. I loved how passionate everyone was and the high level of support that was available at this stage.
4 weeks later it was time to do the entry challenge. It was 1 hour long and I had to resolve 7 challenges. I was very nervous! I really didn’t want to mess up. I didn’t!
I was offered a spot in the march cohort and now I’m 8 weeks through the bootcamp!

DEV Community: Cal Costanza

Bootcamp! My experience - Part 2 (Fundamentals)

Bootcamp! My experience - Part 1 (Intro)