There are only 24 hours in a day! How to manage your time in a boot camp.
You might be asking yourself, “How do I manage my time in the boot camp? I still need to sleep, eat, work, & have a life! Oh no…what have I done?”
Here are some quick tips:
- Organize your class activities and solutions.
- Spend time memorizing syntax and understanding what the code does.
- Code experiment / get creative.
- Walk away when you get too frustrated. It’s always great to take a break!
- Don’t forget to take care of you! Sleep, hydrate, eat healthy, and exercise.
- Seek help when you get stuck for too long. Teachers, TA’s, Google, StackOverFlow, etc.
- Preview any topics before class by looking at the syllabus. Try to get a basic understanding and it will help very much once you get to class.
It seems like there’s never enough time to do everything while you’re in the boot camp. I’m getting tired just thinking about it!
Not just class — there’s the commute and the traffic and the…EVERYTHING!
It’s exhausting! How in the world can you manage all this?
In this post I’m going to make some suggestions. You’ll need to shift things around and make it fit into your life but this will give you a basic framework in which to work.
Let’s start with the beginning of the week — you go to class and do your best to understand the class exercises. Do your best! Get the solutions to each exercise to study! That’s critical. You need the working solutions to understand the exercise when you review it later. After class you get home and you’re tired, and rightfully so. However, try to look back at the class exercises for a hour that same day while the material is fresh in your mind. Remember, don’t stay up too late to do this! Sleep is critical for your brain!
You’ll want to practice what you’ve learned over and over again until you can do it from memory. Yeah, that’s right. You need to be typing in the code repeatedly so that you remember the syntax and you remember how the code looks and functions. You can’t do that by copying and pasting all the time! Copy / Paste is not a way to learn to code! Copy / Paste is great once you already understand how to code that part of your program, but it hinders your learning before that point. Starting from scratch is how you will learn best.
The first two skills you need to develop are a memory for the syntax and an understanding of what the code actually does. How do you know what the code does? Play with it. Try things out, experiment, look for differences in the results as you make changes in the code. You’re not going to break anything important — so get to experimenting! Get curious, get clever, break it, then fix it. The only way you can learn any skill is by practicing a ton. You can’t learn to code by reading and observing. It just … won’t … work!
OK, Whew!!! Long week already and it’s almost over. You’ve been coding for hours and hours all week. Figuring out errors, reading stackoverflow, finding ways to break and fix your experimental code and now you have some skills that you didn’t have just a few days ago! Awesome!
The last class or classes in your week are IMPORTANT ONES! These are the days where you will wrap up the stuff you started at the beginning of the week and will be getting exercises and their solutions that will have a direct correlation with the homework! It’s critical you be on your game.
After the last class day you get home and you deserve to relax for a couple of hours. Give yourself a break for 2 hours and then BOOM. Back on the computer to start coding the class exercises over and over again until they make sense and you know the syntax and the function. This is the time to hit it hard because next you’re going to start using those newly minted skills of yours to work on the homework.
Homework day! Big day! First step is pseudo-coding! For every hour you spend pseudo-coding, you’ll have saved yourself a few hours of disorganized, wasted real coding. Guaranteed! Take my word for it! The more preparation you do the less time you waste later. Spend an hour preparing, waste 2–3 less hours getting nowhere!
If you ever learned a sport or how to play a musical instrument you’ll appreciate this analogy. Let’s take the guitar. If you learn the guitar, you start with very simple things. Here are the strings, this is a note, this is where your fingers go, etc. You don’t start learning by playing a concert with a band! So, why would you learn your skills while doing your homework? You have to hand in the homework and people look at it! LEARN YOUR SKILLS before doing the homework on experimental code that only you get to see. Do that for hours and days and then tackle the homework! The homework develops other skills; problem solving skills, putting the pieces together, understanding algorithms, etc.
One thing I have to say in closing. Some of my best work was done when I walked away from my computer. I would get frustrated many times while trying to debug a program, so what did I do? I got up, took a walk, took a nap, played with my dogs, did some exercise, etc. Those minutes (or hours) away from the computer allowed me to de-stress, think about the problem from a broad perspective and you know what? Many, many times that was the difference between figuring out the problem or not. Sometimes you need to step away. Think about what you need the program to do from a broad perspective without staring at the code. It’s amazing how that helps and…
I hope this helped you!
