Surviving your first week of coding bootcamp
I’m proud to say that I survived my first week of General Assembly’s 3-month Immersive Web Development course.
.. and my brain hurts.
Over the summer I decided to make a change in my life by joining a coding bootcamp. You can read more about why and how I went about the process here.
Previous Coding Experience
While I’d been working in the software industry my entire career and had a strong interest in coding, my technical chops were pretty much nonexistent.
Before I chose to pursue this path, I spent several weeks teaching myself how to code. While I worked through several different sites, I found the paid version of Tree House to be the most inline with my learning style.
However after all the studying, I still felt clueless.
PreCourse Work
After being accepted into General Assembly, I was sent 11 online lessons to work through. While it starts off fairly easy with some basic html/css, it progressively gets more difficult and ambiguous as you go through github and then javascript.
It’s likely you’ll find these lessons challenging depending on your previous experience however you do have access to the GA community through Slack. I found other students to be helpful and responsive.
The First Day
Can’t lie, I was nervous as hell before starting the class. I hadn’t been in a formal education setting in nearly 7 years and I had zero confidence in my coding skills. I felt like an imposter who was soon to be exposed in grand fashion.
My actual experience was the exact opposite. The GA team had a calming effect that flowed through the classroom as they welcomed us to the program. The majority of the first day was spent on ice breakers, introductions to your fellow classmates and getting your computer setup with a 2 hour install fest.
The First Week
The first 5 days of the program blew by at a blinding speed. Our days are structured in two halves with our teachers alternating between the morning and afternoon session.
As you can see below, we cover a huge amount of ground in a very short time.
As expected, the class has been a large time commitment. I typically get up at 6am to study or review before class, stay at the campus until 8–9pm working on the homework with classmates and then study until 12am.
I fall a little above the median in terms of understanding so these hours might vary depending on how challenging you find the material.
Advice
If you’re looking to join a bootcamp or have already been accepted, I would recommend taking any entry level online course in HTML & CSS. While it may seem foreign at first, it is easy to pick up enough basic knowledge to get by.
However it is critical to give yourself as much exposure to javascript before joining any bootcamp. A majority of your time studying should be spent focusing on functions, objects and loops. These are massive and complex subjects which we basically jog by during the first week. If you have zero experience using them, your first week will not be a good one.
//Admitted to General Assembly in November 2016. If you have any questions, feel free to comment!
