A Small Look Back (AKA..what the heck did I do in bootcamp??)
As of this moment, I am setting at about 12 days from graduating Flatiron Schools coding bootcamp. I think this is the perfect moment before I get slammed with all of my capstone work to take a look back and see what the heck I have actually been doing!
Our bootcamp was broken down in 3 week long modules (or phases) that separated out learning backend and front end technologies. Our first two mods was a deep dive into Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We started out by learning the basics of ruby, the language itself, and then we started to move into how do you start to develop relationships in ruby. We learned about one to one, one to many, and many to many relationships. Then, as is super common in our bootcamp as many has found out, once you learn to do it one way you then learn to do it a BETTER way. (Mod 1 done!) You lay the ground work and then build upon that.
Following this we swap to Ruby on Rails, and what a game changer. This was the first time I had ever interacted with any kind of application framework and I loved it. We used rails to act as a backend, or just the MC of the MVC paradigm. Quickly we added in ActiveRecord and before I could blink my eye I was able to spin up a backend using RESTful routes, create custom routes as I needed them , and make complicated relationship models in a snap.
Welcome Mod 3! Mod 3 for us is where you get to do a little exploration on your own. The curriculum is set to show you introductions into the Javascript realm, but you also get some free time on top of this to see what other technologies you want to delve in to. Curriculum wise, we take JS and learn how to apply it on the front end side of things. MOD 3 is all about Vanilla JS. With this, you also learn HTML and CSS to go along with it! You take JS, learn how to select components from webpages, fetch information from a backend, and then display that information by creating new elements on the page dynamically. I also took this time to take my first look into Django and learned how to spin up a backend with Django. I also decided to take a deep dive into Auth and on my project for Mod 3 I implemented fully functional auth on my backend with JWT and B-crypt. After that I stopped taking logging in so easily for granted :)
Mod 4 brings a whole new beast….React JS. For starters, it was one of the mods I had most anticipated, mainly because I felt I knew the least about what React actually was used for. Let me tell you, it did not disappoint. We jumped headfirst into React. We learned how react uses JSX to integrate JS and HTML into one file and then turned that into using and storing state. State then allowed use to dynamically render changes to our webpage based on user input and interactions throughout the entire website. Passing and catching props and then how to get that information you passed to propagate back up to other pages. Throw in some life cycle components using fetch and you have yourself a fully functional website. We also started to tip toe into using hooks as opposed to always having class based components in our react sites. So, for my project I made my personal portfolio using useState and useEffect to learn a little more about them. React in the end was awesome, and probably one of my favorite things learned so far! I feel like I only was barely touching the full capabilities of using React on the frontend.
So, here we are at Mod 5. Mod 5 is our capstone mod. You have. 2.5ish weeks to do a final project. The only requirement is you learn something that we haven’t used before. For myself, I am very interested in learning some mobile development so I am learning Swift and SwiftUI. I am working on a glucose management application that will allow easy tracking of glucose measurements by a patient. Too many times have I experienced a patient coming to me and not knowing there measurements and it was often times a fault of not having a nice and easy way to keep track of this information. It also gives me a chance to check out a brand new language (which I will admit has been quite an undertaking). Even with the challenges though I have thoroughly been enjoying it and I am looking forward to presenting it to my fellow classmates and future employers in few weeks!
The last part I want to include is for anyone who may be reading this and is contemplating going to a bootcamp vs going to (or back to ) college for CS. You may or may not have any idea what the technologies I talked about are or what they are used for. I strongly encourage you to just take a look into them and see what you can learn. I also strongly encourage outreach to your friends, family members, and also people in the industry. I was fortunate. My wife was an electrical engineer and I had access to software engineers at her company to speak to. I spoke to her college classmates who were doing CS and computer engineering. I spoke to anyone that would listen. Finally, it came down to what was right for me, and for me a coding bootcamp was a good option. It may be for you or it may not be for you, but only with a strong thirst for knowledge and the drive to do some research will you fully know! We have a motto at our campus, “Drink the kool-aid” (also no we are not a cult). But, I think it starts before any bootcamp..or going back to/to school.. or whatever you may want to do. You have to take a deep dive into learning about not only the technologies and the job, but also yourself; what exactly it is you want out of life. If you do this, then I promise you, that no matter what path you end up on, you will be successful.