The Second Project of Ironhack’s Web Dev Bootcamp

The struggles and conflicts (pun intended) of the 4th, 5th and 6th weeks and developing our first project on Ironhack’s Web Development Bootcamp.

To give you a little background, you can see my article on why I joined Ironhack’s coding Bootcamp in Lisbon and then, how were my first weeks and my first project, coding a game!

The Back-end Weeks

The 4th and 5th weeks were the ones dedicated to the back-end. We were relieved to finally stop working on those crazy JavaScript algorithms until we realized… It’s never really over (Practice your katas!!)

Because I was a bit more comfortable with Front-End, after taking the FreeCodeCamp’s Responsive Web Dev Certificate, I wasn’t really panicking with the amount of information in the Bootcamp… Until the fifth week.

It was an overwhelming week.

We learned Node.js, Express, MongoDB, and also how to use Mongoose. And how it all fits together. Well, I guess that was the point — I struggled quite a bit during the two weeks — And mostly, during the project.

For me, one of the most cringing things was re-learning a couple of the things we thought we had already learned. Learning different ways to do things, like CSS and SASS. Or, how to access our CSS page and main HTMLs, and why the hell are there so many pages now?

Oh, so many questions, doubts, and confusion, and so little time.

Some people preferred these weeks, and I have to say I hoped that would be me. However, feeling lost and also having no time to stop for a minute and making sense out of things is not something that I (usually) love. Who does? So I felt sad this week, discouraged, and confused, oh so very confused. It was tough. And I seriously wondered whether I made the wisest choice, coming to Ironhack’s Bootcamp.

But I carried on — I guess that’s what you do, right? Probably not at my best, but always trying to deliver everything that was asked and doing all the work. Probably for the first time, I had to trust the process and that everything was going to be all right.

Preparing for Hiring Week

These weeks were also about LinkedIn and CV perfection. To improve it, redesign it, along the same lines we had already decided we would change our lives. This should match these people we were studying to be, these new lives being crafted, but the problem was — We were still not there. We were in an in-between, a confusing limbo.

I guess it never became as real as it did then when I finally wrote “Web developer” next to my name.

God, I was crazy scared. Wait, is this the famous Imposter Syndrome?

You bet it is.

Everything got so fast-paced that suddenly it was already project week.

The First Project and the importance of choosing the right group

My group was incredible, and it made all the difference in our success on the two last projects.

I encourage you to find a group that challenges you but that you can also share a laugh with and stop working for a while to share a joke, or a life story. Find people who are better than you in some things and worse than you and others so that you can both learn from them and help them out in case of need.

Find people who share your sense of tardiness (or lack of it) and your sense of working hours, what is late and what is necessary.

I was so lucky to have found these two amazing people! They were committed, and we were mostly on the same page. In fact, they were so amazing that I sometimes felt like I wasn’t doing enough to keep the “awesomeness” level. I compensated with Bootstrap.

We created our first app together: Save My Date.

We had two project ideas, which we ran by our TAs (Teaching Assistants) and Lead Teacher, and agreed to do a “Date Planner”, which would be more complex. (I still think that our previous idea — matching a beer with a movie would be a cool idea! Oh well — Maybe after the Bootcamp!)

There was a great UX Workshop on Monday, which helped us to organize our project: We created a user flow and put together a kanban, created our micro-tasks in our backlog. We had only 4 days to go and none of us had ever worked writing code with other people, or, well, coded anything as big as this!

The first day was all spent on creating routes in Express.js and experimenting with Zomato API. The major difficulties on this were accessing the data on the API, and that took us a while since we hadn’t focused a lot on that in class — It was advisable not to use APIs on our projects, since “86,3%” of times the students would end up having problems with them.

I’m glad we did — Mostly because we learned a lot about working with APIs — Love it, don’t fear it, guys. But use them carefully and wisely. Test, test, test!

We tried to use GitHub and version control as much as possible, always working on different parts of the project and committing as often as we could, communicating every time we did. We had no significant issues.

We also decided on a mobile-first approach and to have all the app working on our mobile, from start to end — Fortunately, we pulled that off.

We used MongoDB, Express.js, Node.js,, and then Bootstrap for the front-end visuals.

We also used MapBox to find the user’s location and NodeMailer to send e-mails inviting the ‘partner’ for the planned date.

The user flow would be as follows: You would be able to give your location to the app and after that, it would show places to drink, or go dancing, or go for a coffee. It would be a “date-savior” sort of app, when you wanna go somewhere else after but you want the choices to be filtered for you. So many choices nowadays!

The app would also give you the option to set a time for your date and send your date-companion an e-mail with an invitation.

Eventually, while our confidence grew, we also built a section with cinemas in Lisbon and another showing a random movie, if your date option would be “Netflix & chill”. Wink wink, right? We know.

As a bonus, in the last day (presentation day) we even thought that maybe our app would also work in other countries if only we would remove the “city” filter which we had used to start our API searches. And amazingly enough, it did!

In a word — Our project made us feel like bad-asses.

And I guess that was the point.

Presenting the project and final feedback

When presenting your project, it’s essential to spend some time also thinking about how you’re going to “sell” it. You can only do it once, so make sure you do it right!

We deployed to Heroku a day before just to make sure everything would go well and made sure it was tested thoroughly.

In our presentation, a random person was able to use the app from start to finish, and everything worked perfectly. It was exciting and nerve-wracking. I loved it!

We had terrific feedback, and… We won first place.

Also, you know what? The craziness of the previous weeks finally started to pay off… It was all slowly starting to make sense.

This represents my own opinion and experience with the Ironhack Bootcamp in Lisbon. I sincerely believe that when you enter a Bootcamp, you get as much back as you put in as an effort.

I am by no means an expert in any of the topics presented here, but I am studying towards that specific goal. I hope that this helps anyone considering doing a Bootcamp, either with Ironhack or a similar company.

In case of any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.