Coding Bootcamp Week 1/13: Back to Basics (Not Really)

4 min readOct 24, 2021

So… I got into Northcoders Coding School, and it’s awesome AF.

If you’ve been following my previous articles about my self-teaching journey, you’d know that I’ve been doing good. Scrimba is cool, free resources are great, but after my first week at Northcoders, I realised nothing beats a good ‘ol classroom setting… virtually of course.

Who are Northcoders

Northcoders is a coding school that has campuses in Manchester and Leeds, UK that offers coding bootcamps to just about anyone. And I mean, ANYONE.

Their Diversity & Inclusion page details:

We believe that no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love or who you worship, you should be welcomed. We stand with #BlackLivesMatter, affirm all gender identities and sexualities and support people living with disabilities and neurodiversities.

…and honestly, I couldn’t feel more welcome.

Me reading their page ❤️

I must admit, I would have had second thoughts about trying to get into Northcoders if it weren’t for this page on their website, on their emphasis on diversity and inclusion. It’s just amazing.

How I got into Northcoders

I found Northcoders through one of my many adventures on Google, and I quickly signed up to their mailing list to access the curriculum. It’s everything I wanted to learn, and the community sounds amazing.

Although I can vividly remember closing the tab straightaway upon seeing that the bootcamp costs about £7,200, and I am unemployed with barely £400 to my name.

Actual footage of me finding out the costs

I was heartbroken, but I don’t know why I was surprised, I KNEW bootcamps cost a lot, as they should, but I guess it was more of my reaction to the level of broke-ness I was in.

And then one day, many weeks later after I have signed up to the mailing list, I got an email from Northcoders with the anouncement that they have opened Excellence Scholarship applications in the Northern regions. “Panic” was an understatement.

I started the process of the application, got informed that there will be an entry challenge, started preparing for said entry challenge, and aced it. I was later informed that I got the Excellence Scholarship, and I was way WAY over the moon, NASA had to launch a space rocket to rescue me.

Precourse Tasks

I already learned a lot during my preparation for the entry challenge, and I learned even more doing the Precourse tasks that we had to do before our cohort date started.

I had to complete a lot of coding katas, and I could get used to the dopamine rush whenever I get a green tick everytime my code works. It’s truly one of the best feelings in the world. And proportionally the worst feeling whenever it doesn’t work. But the longer it doesn’t work, the better it feels when it finally does work. Ahhh.

I also learned how to use the terminal, command line, git, and github.

How it feels using the terminal for the first time

Coding Bootcamp Week 1: Back to Basics (Not Really)

It’s a Sunday as I’m writing this, and I have started the bootcamp the previous Monday, and I’m not joking when I say that I’ve learned more during the past week than I did the past couple of months of trying to teach myself how to code.

I’m doing the bootcamp remotely, as I am nowhere near Manchester nor Leeds, but the setup is effective for me personally and I have no complains.

The lectures are held on Zoom, and we are free to ask questions at any time. Watching an expert explain to you how something works and having access to these great mentors are priceless. They also provide us with notes for every lecture.

For the first week, we have refreshed on/learned the following:

Command Line & Git
Data Variables and Expressions
Logic
Functions and Execution Context
Arrays and Iteration
Understanding Errors
Objects
Using Array Methods
Exports and Require
RegEx
HTML & CSS

As the subheading indicates, Back to Basics (Not Really), these are all pretty basic concepts in coding that we were already exposed to during the entry challenge preparation and precourse tasks, but the mentors expanded more on these concepts to get us to better understand them more. Presumably, we only scratched the surface this past week, and we’ll see more of these concepts in the next weeks.

This is also the page that I created for our HTML & CSS task, which I’m pretty proud of despite the messy code.

I apologise in advance. You’ll know what I mean.

I guess I’m doing this weekly now

The 2nd week out of 13 begins tomorrow, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve decided to make this a weekly thing now to document my bootcamp journey.

Until next week!

Northcoders Bootcamp Series