Coding Bootcamp Week 5/13: First Week on Back-end

3 min readNov 21, 2021

I remember wanting to be exclusively a front-end developer. After 1 week on back-end, now I’m not so sure!

A kitchen is to a restaurant as back-end is to development.

When I decided I wanted to become a developer, this video by Coder Coder pushed me to completely dive into it. In this video, Jessica Chan compares development to a restaurant. The front-end would be what the customer sees and experiences (front-of-house part, interior decor, tables and chairs, etc.), and back-end would be the kitchen where all processes happen.

I started this development learning journey with a focus on front-end, because I thought I could never be bothered about back-end. I had never been so wrong in my life.

What we Learned This Week

Create server with Http and expressJS
Model View Controller
Middleware
Routers
SQL Setup, Introduction, and Relationships
Postgres

On top of these things, we also had a two-day refresher on Promises, where we were introduced to using Promise.race and refreshed on using Promises in general.

Http: The Long and Winding Road

One thing I noticed about the structure of the bootcamp is we are taught the long and winding road first, before anything else, before the easy road. The first impression after learning the easy route is always, “Why must they let us suffer this way?”

Hiding the pain like Harold

But if we think about it, it is 100% essential to learn how to walk before we. run.

I was in Spain when we were querying with Http, except the letter S is silent. I wrote like 200 lines for like 4 types of queries. Pretty exhausting. But when we learned expressJS, it was a whole new world.

Creating a Database + PostgreSQL

Being a former administrative assistant, I used to live and breathe spreadsheets. I have come to realise that back-end databases are quite like managing and manipulating data in spreadsheets, only databases are on steroids and spreadsheets kneel before them.

There’s a lot to be learned, but so far we have learned how to create a database using PostgreSQL, and how to do basic queries. My mind kept going back to when I was still an administrative assistant and how this back-end skill could have made my job exponentially easier. Northcoders weren’t joking when they said programming skills are 100% transferrable!

Meeting the Careers Team

On Friday, we met the careers team for the first time. It was a quick Zoom session where someone from the careers team laid out how they’re going to provide us career support throughout the bootcamp. We also got to ask questions.

What I found out:

95% of Northcoders Graduates land a job within 3 months after graduation.
Career support includes access to partner companies jobs board, skills mentoring, support and guidance with creating CV and portfolio, mock interviews, mock tech tests and support, etc.
We will have group sessions and we will also have 1-on-1 sessions and our own private Slack channel.
We have career support from Northcoders forever. Once a Northcoder, always a Northcoder!

It was a nice session, and extremely reassuring to us who joined the bootcamp with career shifting in mind.

Before I enrolled in the bootcamp, I binged this playlist and got very inspired! If they can do it, I can too!

Conclusion

I’m not going to make my decision to go full-on back-end just yet, because I still might like front-end when we get to the front-end block of the bootcamp. However, I’m pleased to say that I am enjoying back-end more than I expected, and I look forward to learning more.

More back-end coming next week!

Northcoders Bootcamp Series