7 tips for better bootcamp learning
In the fast-paced environment of a coding bootcamp, it can feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water with the amount of content and concepts being thrown at you every day. Here are some of my top tips for making your learning more productive.
1. Get a Note-taking App
Get yourself a good note-taking app, ideally one that’s designed for programmers. It needs to be lightweight and have the ability to create code snippets. This is so important. Trying to open up Microsoft Word and at the beginning of a lecture, and desperately trying to get the indentation right and stop autocorrect ruining your code is going to waste you so much time.
I use Quiver, but Evernote and Bear are also popular choices.
2. Learn Markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language often used for Readme documents and instructions. It’s simple to learn and is the best format to use if you want to make notes inside a code project. A little time spent studying a markdown cheatsheet will pay dividends. Make sure your text editor has a markdown previewer and you know how to use it, so that you can see either the raw or the formatted version of the file.
Markdown also allows code snippets with correct syntax highlighting for different languages.
3. Use Github Gists
Github gists allow you to save files, snippets or code examples in isolation. You can make them public or private. One great feature is that gists can be inserted into Medium articles, preserving code formatting, which looks really nice. But a more common use is to store snippets and examples of useful code, configuration files, etc. Having a selection of gists for anything you might quickly want to refer it is much easier than having to trawl through all your projects trying to remember which one had that example of error handling middleware you want to copy.
4. Sort Our Your File Organisation
Adopt a sensible way of organising your work from the outset. A lot of students begin by organising code week by week, but I find this method gets harder to manage as the course continues and you forget what you did every week. If you work in sprints or mini-projects, using sprint names and core technologies in your directory names (e.g. redux-shopping-cart) can save you a lot of time spent trawling through code trying to find what you’re after.
Use git commits and branches properly to keep track of code in different states, rather than ending up with copies of the same projects in lots of different stages of completion. This is exactly what git is for!
5. Plan your reading
It’s common to end up with bookmarks all over the place, 100 tabs open in 3 different browsers and Slack messages with useful links being lost behind days’ worth of conversation. Decide on a way to organise your reading — apps like Pocket or Instapaper allow you to save articles for reading later, and Wakelet allows you to organise collections of bookmarks, videos, files and images. If you find you save a lot of documentation pages in your bookmarks, you might find an app like Dash useful which is an API documentation browser and snippet viewer.
6. Make use of Snippets
Snippets are pieces of reusable code that can be dropped into a file with just a couple of keystrokes. A code editor will allow you to define what snippets you want available, or you can use a program like Dash to manage your code snippets. For example, I write React components all the time so I defined some snippets in VSCode to save myself some work. All I have to do is begin typing comp-stateful, comp-stateless or comp-functional in my editor and I can choose to insert a React component template.
Once the benefit of typing the same block of code out by hand multiple times begins to wane, create a snippet and free your time up to focus on what isn’t already second nature.
Share snippets with your classmates and help everyone out!
7. Write!
The process of writing can help your mind organise all those nebulous, cacophonous thoughts into something coherent, which is a really valuable exercise. Trying to explain something you’ve learnt helps you clarify the core concepts, and quickly identify areas that you haven’t fully understood. I would encourage you to blog about your learning journey, perhaps setting a goal of writing once a week. Reflect on what you’ve learnt, acknowledge what was difficult and identify what you want to work harder on in the coming weeks. The process of being conscious and reflective in the learning process — called metacognition — is a widely recognised technique for helping students learn more successfully.
In addition, having posts to look back on in the future can help you remember how far you’ve come at times when you’re feeling low.
If you want to start blogging, Medium is a great place to start!
Do you have any other tips for effective learning? Have you been writing about your bootcamp experience? Let us know on twitter!
Harriet is a tutor at Northcoders.
