5 Lessons You Learn Only After a Coding Bootcamp
It was in late 2016 when I caught the coding bug. At first, it was a subtle twitch, then it took over my headspace and eventually it pushed me into unknown territory. One year later I have a new profession, a new workplace and (supposedly) a new compartment in my brain.
The most significant step of my career transition was attending a 3 months full-time coding bootcamp. There are quite a few of them out there, and they differ in terms of their programs. They, however, do not differ in terms of their promise: They will make you ready for the job market.
I always struggled a bit with the fairness of that promise, although I have learnt big parts of my basic web development knowledge at my coding bootcamp. With this article, I would like to add a more realistic angle on such type of education, but I also want to encourage your journey in case you have caught the same bug yourself. So 4 months post Coding Bootcamp, these are the 5 (out of 1000) most important lessons I learnt so far.
<1> Time travel to the medieval ages of the Internet.
As soon as you dip your toes into the web development industry, you will realise that the waves are going rogue. Chances are high that it will completely overwhelm you.
CSS Grid, CSS Flexbox, Vue.js, — everything is better and faster and easier than the things you previously heard of. Here is the spoiler: No matter what new library or framework is coming out, they are still going to be somehow based on the original concepts of CSS, JavaScript and HTML.
Try to stand the pressure of knowing ‘the cool shit’ and focus on learning the basics really, really well. It will help you pick up any buzzword framework way easier afterwards. I also found it beneficial to refresh my general knowledge about the Document Object Model and how the Internet works.
<2> Console.log(every-freaking-thing).
Bootcamps are fueled by time pressure and by learning all. the. things. In order to meet a deadline, you might find yourself googling code snippets and stitching together a solution you’re not really sure of why it actually works.
When working as web developer in a team, you will have to adjust to the standards of your fellow co-coders and might run into situations where the existing code base is conflicting with your freshly written (3 lines of) code. Here is where debugging becomes your superhero cape.
Simply put: Console.log() your life. Log any value your function is receiving, log the function itself, backtrace log the entire way of your value from the first declaration to showing up in the markup. Surely there are more advanced methods of debugging (check debugger features in your code editor or web browser), but this is a good way to start. I also found it really helpful to watch my more senior co-workers debugging and pick it up from them.
<3> Time-box your tasks to learn when to ask for help.
As an aspiring web developer, you have a birthmark. You never know how much you actually know, but you are sure you don’t know a lot. When starting my job, I found the biggest challenge to know when I could ask for help. Not only did I want to prove my qualifications, I also wanted to ‘crack that problem’ myself and not be too hindering for the team.
Truth is, not asking for help is probably the most hindering thing you can do. In an agency situation, you are blocking yourself as a resource, not being able to take on another task and being billed for it. But also as an internal developer, you might block your team or a project.
To be clear: Of course, you have to learn things yourself and should try to come up with a solution. However, you don’t have the same ‘bootcamp luxury’ of fiddling around with a solution for days by yourself. For my work, it helps me a lot to ask for realistic timeframes when being given new tasks and asking for help whenever I go beyond them.
<4> Take your code for a date, then change it.
The biggest lesson I learnt is to invest time to properly read and understand existing code before changing it. You obviously feel super smart when going in and making things better (and it still works, wow). But in 11 out of 10 cases, the person before you had a thought when writing that code which you will realise once other things don’t work anymore. Make yourself familiar with all relevant variables and methods, if possible clarify questions with your teammate and only then make changes.
Before writing down this point, I asked myself: ‘Can advice be too commercial?’ (I decided no). You can probably read this in anything ever being written about web development, but it’s just true: Any coding problem can be broken down into smaller chunks. If you are stuck, try to focus on the smallest issue. If you don’t know what the smallest issue is, ask for hints.
Not only error messages, also the code-base itself can seem overwhelming. Server-side, client-side, third-party API, templating engines, 1 million different files — how does all of this belong together? When getting involved in a new project, I now ask for somebody to run me through the code-base and explain its architecture, which makes a big difference.
<5> It takes time to learn new things, d’oh!
Many web developers are self-taught and you probably heard success stories like ‘learning to code on YouTube and then working at Google’. Considering the sheer amount of available tutorials, courses and podcasts, it is tempting to forget about the time you will have to spend to consume all of this information. The entire concept of a coding bootcamp (3 months until developer) doesn’t make things better.
I loved Gavin Strange’s book ”Do Fly”, which gives some great advice towards this issue. You don’t have to put your entire life on hold in order to pick up new knowledge. Do it after work for 30 minutes, work on it for one lunch break a week. Break it down into small goals and work on it over time. To give a more specific example, I recently bought an ES6 course, which has 77 video clips of 5–7 minutes to go through. I try to watch at least 2–3 clips a week, and it helped me to write better code already.
One specific picture does always encourage me: Imagine you decided to become a carpenter. You have zero experience but play around with wood for three months. Now you want to build a roof-construction — is that a good idea? I personally think that web development is a kind of craftsmanship which needs just as much time, experience and dedication to become good at. You go!
// About //
My name is Valerie, I live in Amsterdam and work for technology & design firm Your Majesty. I attended NYCDA’s Bootcamp’ Web Development Intensive’ in Amsterdam, which I can recommend. If you want to read more about my bootcamp experience, you can check out my other articles on LinkedIn.
