This project has been a secret until now.
Bootcamp Plus?
That's I envisioned this. With all the services out there offering plus subscriptions, this felt like it aligned. Attending a development Bootcamp is a great service to offer, but it comes with ads. Nothing wrong with bootcamps, but as you go through the program, it's going to only teach you as much as your brain can handle in the short amount of time given.
This is where an "AHA" moment occurred for me. I have spoken to many people who went to development bootcamps and self-taught developers, career switching into the tech industry. There was a common thread, it took longer to land a full-time position than they anticipated.
Is there a way for a shorter timeline? Were there programs out there that could support these individuals who have graduated a bootcamp, but now are left to learn on their own? And for those self-taught learners, was there any sort of support for them?
These questions came crashing down on me. When I started in the development world back in 2006, there was no social media for developers. The people I knew in the tech industry were my co-workers. I did not have a mentor, but I had co-workers helping me out. It was not easy going to them for help because I felt hopeless. I felt like I needed to understand these concepts and not having to always be asking questions. I didn't feel comfortable going to them about my development issues. I needed a mentor and I did not know how to find one, nor did I know I needed one.
I participated in an NFL survivor pool with a friend. He was the commissioner and managed over 400+ entries from around 80+ individuals manually on a spreadsheet. I approached him to see if he'd be open to having my Discord group of developers build an application for him at no cost. He agreed, and I went off searching for who ever wanted to participate.
This is where Bootcamp+ comes in. I saw a void. I saw that there were aspiring developers starving to find any sort of experience to help them land their first tech role. This is when I started to put my long waited plans to start cohort 0 for Bootcamp+.
Curriculum
This wasn't just going to be a normal Bootcamp curriculum. I wanted to put these individuals through a corporate process. It would require patience, learning, and a much slower pace than building a personal project. Many of these individuals had never worked in teams nor with a project process.
I wanted to bring in an Agile mythology. Every team, every company, has their own way of interpreting agile. Therefore, we are going to take the approach as well. We will figure out what works best for our team and adapt. I wanted to use Sprints and have stand-ups, but with the few months we've been working on this project, it's very difficult to do this when most of us are doing this part-time and this isn't our job. We've started meeting once a week to sync up and providing updates when we have them asynchronously.
Something new to these individuals was the high level planning of the technologies they were going to use. At first, it was very difficult because many of them just wanted to build before they had a well-thought-out plan. This would force them to learn the “why”. Why are we using this application, why are we using this technology, why are we building it this way. In the beginning, a few of the presentations were read directly from the documentation. I called them out on this and said this isn't a presentation of what they found. Anyone could go to a documentation site and read their docs. I wanted to understand if the technology they chose would be a good decision for the team and what task it was going to accomplish for our project. After some iterations, everyone understood the process. It wasn't easy, but we all learned that planning something before building was a vital process to building out an efficient project.
Processes that we have not yet gotten to yet are Sprint Demos, thorough code reviews, milestone branches, a release cadence, QA testing in the staging environment, and conflicts. I foresee that these will be a big learning curve as well, but my hope is that after we go through this and publically display our learnings, each one of these individuals will have a leg up on their competition.
Roles and Responsibilities
What I did was split up the team into 3 different disciplines. The UX Engineers, Frontend Engineers, and Software Engineers. By splitting the team into these specific roles, everyone had a clear focus of what they owned. This didn't mean they couldn't cross over into another role to help out. It just meant that they understood what their number one priority was.
UX Engineers would be the ones focused on bridging the gap between design and development. They would build out the UI Component library, work closely with our designer, and build out the layouts for our project.
Frontend Engineers would focus on the manipulation of data, client side application infrastructure, API integration, and more.
Software Engineers were our backend developers. They would focus on DevOps, database, server infrastructure, and more.
Why waste my time on something that has little ROI (return of investment)?
It's only a waste of your time if you feel like it. Just because others consider it a wash, doesn't mean it has to for you. I always look at the things I do as an opportunity to learn. Even when I lose at sports, fail on delivering on a task, or ate a pineapple pizza. I try to find an opportunity to get better.
This pertains towards the Gridiron Survivor project because there are immediate rewards for myself conducting this project. I'm using my precious time to manage this product, run meetings, find sponsors, and much more.
Here's a secret, I'm not losing if someone I care for is winning.
This process works and there's proof
Data may disappoint, but it never ever lies
I found this quote while building out my talk about Data Driven UX Decisions. It couldn't be more true.
In the beginning of this project, I was hoping that at least 1 member of our team would land a job after this project was done. Just 1. I can happily report that 1 person was hired after a few weeks working on this project. This project wasn't the sole reason this person landed their job, but it allowed myself and their employer to see their talents. There's no better way to interview someone without interviewing them than to build in public. If there's a way for someone to hear your thought process, see your work, watch you fail to understand how to not fail the same way again, then do it.
When you enter the interview cycle, most of the time you will not pass the first or second round. Heck, you may not even receive a call back. The individual that was hired from this project had applied to hundreds of jobs, receive 0 callbacks, and wanted to quit. When my friend and I reviewed their resume and portfolio, we understood why. None of them stood out. It was a very common portfolio that we would look at for 3 seconds and pass on.
How could a hiring team have known that this person was going to be a great hire if they gave them no chance at all?
Back to this individual. They are not thriving and enjoying every day of their new development role. I was able to meet them in-person and let them know what my “nod” was.
From the movie Groove: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212974/characters/nm0690263
Guy : Why do you do this to yourself? Don't even get paid, risk getting arrested, for what?
Ernie : You don't know?
Guy : No.
Ernie : The Nod.
Guy : The Nod?
Ernie : Happens to me at least once every party. Some guy comes up to me and says "Thank you for making this happen... I needed this. This really meant something to me." And they nod... and I nod back.
Guy : [scoffs] ... That's it?
Ernie : That's it.
This person thanked me for changing their entire financial future. It was a distant dream that it would happen, but it's now happening.
That's my “nod”.
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