In For The Long Haul

More from the Andela Bootcamp

Anthony Waithaka
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

It’s been five days and now the first week of Bootcamp comes to a close. Some of us will progress to the next week while the rest will have a choice to drop out completely or try again with the next cohort.

All in all, I feel like it was an extraordinary week filled with both good and bad things. The YOYO (You Own Your Own) learning programme used for Bootcamp gave me a fair share of both, some of which I’d like to present.

Pros and Benefits

  1. We all got to see what we’re capable of achieving when given a set of instructions and the results speak for themselves in how far we progressed into the given tasks.
  2. The Bootcamp project challenged us to go out of our way and find learning material, whether from the internet or from peers. This built up our skill for gathering useful information only.
  3. Having an open community to interact with and ask questions about the task, what it entails and how to accomplish it forced one to open up to others and communicate. Failure to do this meant making very little progress.
  4. The remote sessions tested our sense of responsibility. There was no chance of riding on the crowd’s success or relying overly much on what someone else has done.

Cons and Downsides

  1. It seemed to me that we were working with a recently updated Learning Programme where the kinks haven’t quite been ironed out yet.
    While I wouldn’t support hand-holding or anything of the like, I think that perhaps a more streamlined learning path with strictly defined outcomes would have been a great benefit.

Only One Downside?!

Our success or setback depends entirely on what we do and how we do it. Bootcamp had enough action and result paired together for one to get a feel of what the administration intended to get out of the aspiring developers.

I believe that with full cooperation there would be no downsides at all to Bootcamp’s first week. Alas, we are human and mistakes will be made. What matters is that the chance is given (and the opportunity taken) to recover from those mistakes, in this or the next cohort.

Have a splendid day!

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