Coding Bootcamp Week 9/13: New Year, New Tech

5 min readJan 9, 2022

Before anything else, Happy New Year everyone! 🎉

Three Week Break Over

After a 3-week break, we are now back to regular programming (no pun intended).

I had a lovely holiday with the family and essentially stuffed myself with holiday food. New year’s eve was pretty quiet for me and my husband as we decided to stay home instead of going out to watch the fireworks. With the new Omicron variant, we’re trying to be as safe as possible.

Nonetheless, I still welcomed 2022 with enthusiasm and hope: hoping that this year brings us better circumstances than the last 2 years.

Regrettably, I haven’t done much coding during the break. I must admit I was enjoying it very much, catching up with all my backlogs: books, games, series, films, name it. I have also went back to playing the violin after taking a pause for a whole year.

Despite the regrets, I can say that it refreshed me quite nicely and gave me a much needed break from the intensive bootcamp. Now I am ready to take on more challenges with a fresher mind.

Back to Frontend with React

I’m not gonna lie, when I first heard of the term frontend, I assumed it was all CSS and zero Javascript. That’s why I always thought frontend was way simpler than backend, and was an easier route to become a developer. Now I’ve come to realise that none of them are simple, and frontend can get as complicated as backend.

Before we took our break, we had one full week of introduction to react. After this week, I’ve found react to be very intuitive (especially when we were introduced to React Routers.) I couldn’t stop thinking of the things I can create and build.

What we Learned this Week

This week is our second week in the three-week Frontend block, and we learned the following:

Data fetching using useEffect
CSS styling conventions and libraries
Mini intro on React UI Libraries
React Router, and react hooks like useParams and useNavigate

During one of the paired sprints, we faced an issue with a sign-in page that we created. We wanted the “Sign In” button to both set the current user state, AND also link us to the dashboard path.

We couldn’t figure out how to do it, so a mentor introduced us to useNavigate and everything went well. useNavigate is my favourite thing now.

Oh and by the way, special thanks to mentor Jonny for this epic photo edit. My name does sound like “calm and carry on”. 😂

How I Got✨ RUSTY ✨

Going back into serious coding after 3 whole weeks, I felt rusty. It felt like, “Hmm yes I recognise this code… maybe in another life…” or something like that.

I was so frustrated and I almost spiralled. “What does this bit of code do? How do you do this? Wait, I know how to do it, but I forgot how. Will I ever remember again? I’m never taking a break again. This is what happens when I do. I’m gonna code everyday for the rest of my life so this doesn’t happen again.”

Thankfully, one of the mentors checked up on me privately because I had sneaked in a questionable 💀 emoji in one of the Slack messages asking how we are. They reassured me that it’s normal to feel rusty after taking a break, and after this week we should all have blown all the cobwebs off. They were right.

When the week was over, I definitely felt like I have just picked up where I left off in December, and I was worrying over nothing. The sprints definitely helped, but my nightly hours of revising helped significantly. If I can pick up where I left off on the violin after taking a whole year break, I can do it with coding with a 3-week break.

These are the quotes that helped me through the week:

“I am capable of doing difficult things.” — Anonymous
“Whether you think you can, or you can’t, you are right.” — Henry Ford

CV and Cover Letter Workshop

The highlight of my week was meeting with the career coaches and having a CV and Cover Letter workshop.

I was terrified of thinking about writing my CV and Cover Letter, given that I am shifting careers and barely have any technical background, save for my one freelance experience with technical writing.

The imposter syndrome kicked in, but I was so relieved that I got them done and the career coaches have given me a thumbs up. As usual, they constantly reassured me that I’m gonna be fine, which I really appreciate.

Me trying to write my tech skills section

New Year Manifestations

I have recently acknowledged the power of manifestations. Not in the spiritual sense, but how it influences one’s mindset. If you “manifest” something, you’re not really hoping for a miracle to happen, you’re subconsciously “setting” your mind to work on it.

So for this year, I manifest that I will graduate from this bootcamp, and start my new career as a developer.

“Itaga mo sa bato”, as we would say in Tagalog. It is an idiom that literally means “go carve it in stone”, and means “I swear it.”

I will be a developer before the year ends. Itaga mo sa bato.

Northcoders Bootcamp Series