My Time At Fullstack Academy
A little less than a year ago I started my commitment to learn how to code. Initially I said I’d give it ~150 hours to see if I understood and enjoyed it. About 50 hours in to FreeCodeCamp I knew that I loved it.
I was living in Melbourne at the time and I decided to dedicate my life to code. I quit my job and used some of my savings to live in Bali for a couple of months and study full-time. My goal was to get accepted into Fullstack Academy — a highly competitive fullstack Javascript bootcamp.
I had my interview in early February and was accepted into the program about a week later.
Due to the time difference I had to do my Skype interview at 3am my time. I highly suggest you do not do this. I did not perform as well as I could have, but emailed multiple solutions after my interview.
I started in the June cohort with around 40 other amazingly talented individuals. Around 15 of those were some of the brightest college students I had ever met.
During the first week we started off with Data Structures…something I’d never even heard of. We had to implement complex recursive sorting algorithms and other lower-level computer science-y stuff. I felt like an idiot. It was awesome.
I realized that with this program I was going to get out what I put in. I would get in no later than 830am and wouldn’t leave until around 7pm every day. That’s a lot of coding time.
We entered the world of Node and although I had worked with it before I had no idea what was actually going on. The curriculum touches the surface of what goes on under the hood in packages like Express, Sequelize, Angular (now teaching React/Redux), Bluebird, etc… It doesn’t take a deep dive into these technologies, but gives you enough knowledge to go around and poke on your own.
This is something I strive to do now when I use a package. If something is giving you trouble, try looking under the hood of the module to see what’s going on and see if you can modify the source code to work with your needs.
Reading and understanding other people’s code is something that Fullstack has fully prepared me for. Whether it’s looking into my classmate’s projects, or Fullstack’s internal learning platform, I’m a lot more confident than I was before in reading foreign code.
The entire first 6-weeks of the program is focused around pair programming. This is something I had never done before, but it was a good skill to learn. Sometimes it went great, and other times it went not-so-great. It totally depends on how your coding style meshes with your partner’s. I did notice that the quality of code in our projects that came from pairing sessions was higher than solo/cowboy-code.
After Junior phase we entered the project-based Senior phase. This was even more intense than the first 6 weeks as I’d be putting in 12–13 hour days (consistently loving it). We built an e-commerce application from scratch during the first week and a half. This was a fantastically stressful introduction to Git and building a full-blown web application in a team.
After that we had a 3-day hackathon project. I built an application, Me$h, that uses the Web-Audio API to overlay advertisements on songs instead of having them totally separate. This is how I wish streaming services would serve ads. Presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynkgWzYiFmE
Finally we had our capstone projects. We were put into teams of 4 and told to crank out an awesome project within about 2.5 weeks. My team and I built a suite of password management tools called CryptoPass. The suite includes a desktop application, iOS and Android application, and a Chrome extension. You can check out our presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyPG_kuOyAA.
Fullstack employs “Teaching Fellows” who are sort of like a TA equivalent. Teaching fellows are graduates of Fullstack who want to stick around and help teach new students as well as do engineering work for the school.
When I started the Junior cohort my goal was to be a Fullstack Fellow. It seemed like an awesome opportunity to hone my developer skills, as well as teach incoming students the magic of coding.
I have been a fellow for 6 weeks now and absolutely love it. We get to engineer in an Agile environment on our internal learning platform, as well as teach. Seeing student’s improvements after such a short amount of time is incredibly rewarding. The students are heading into Senior phase next week and I can’t wait to see what they build!
Shout out to FreeCodeCamp for providing an awesome way to get into programming. I can’t thank Quincy and the team enough and I can’t wait to start submitting PR’s of my own :).
Feel free to check out my github at https://github.com/bighitbiker3
If you or anyone you know is looking to hire an enthusiastic software developer please let me know. I’ll be available for work in December :).
