I took a semester off to enroll in a software engineering bootcamp. Here’s why you should too.
About my experience at a web development bootcamp
My journey to a software engineering bootcamp
In my first year of university, I took two computer science courses in Racket and C++. As I learned the basics of CS in these classes, I slowly fell in love with programming. I soon realized I wanted to explore the world of coding, beyond what I was simply doing in class. As a result, I ended up dabbling in several online courses and working as a research intern for a computational lab on campus, where I filtered large datasets in Python.
Then summer break came, and I was faced with a dilemma. Up until then, I had only coded to complete small tasks, whether it be class assignments or my duties as a research intern. I needed to have a bigger project under my belt — something similar to what actual industry developers work on. The question was, how would I learn the skills to create something like this?
After much contemplation and doing some research online, I decided to take my first semester of sophomore year off and enroll in a web development bootcamp near my house in Korea. The bootcamp was a six-month long program that taught all the skills necessary to become a successful entry-level developer. I was blown away by the quality of projects completed by past students, and figured the bootcamp would serve as an opportunity to learn practical industry skills not taught in school.
The bootcamp experience
During the summer, I participated in the “Pre Course” section of the bootcamp: a part-time, 10-week course in basic Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Git / Github. Learning how to manipulate the DOM with vanilla JS was a particularly empowering experience — I finally had the ability to make my ideas come to life in the browser. I applied these skills to my summer internship in machine learning, creating two client-side applications for training the company’s Sagemaker and Tensorflow ML models.
After successfully completing the Pre Course, I was prepared to take the next step: the Immersive Course. For 11 hours a day, I would learn countless topics in web development: classes, data structures, time and space complexity, algorithms, AJAX, React, Redux, Node.js, Express, authentication techniques, SQL and NoSQL database management systems. Students were also required to complete a small mini-project in pairs for each topic learned, all over the course of five weeks. It was a mentally and physically draining experience, but well worth the struggle — by the end of five weeks, I had all the knowledge needed to begin the team project stage.
For the first two-week project, I proposed an idea for a web-based video annotation tool called Vidplus. By working on the front-end for this project, I learned more about prototyping user interfaces, making the most out of React lifecycle methods, and patterns for state management with API requests using Redux and Redux-Saga.
Then came the final four-week project. For this project, our team decided to create a publishing platform for book curations and reviews called Booktogether. I was the only back-end developer on our team, which allowed me to explore a wider range of options and technologies such as database servers in the cloud (MongoDB Atlas) and open-source search engines (Elasticsearch).
Working as the only back-end team member, of course, did not mean I was exempt from collaboration. Our team followed the Agile Scrum methodology, which tasked us with daily stand-up meetings and code reviews. During these meetings, I communicated the details of the REST API documentation that I had written and made suggestions to improve the quality of back- and front-end code so that we would end up with a more robust application.
My growth as a developer
When I first signed up for the bootcamp, I thought it would just be a way for me to take my coding skills to the next level. It was simply a method through which I would be able to gain industry-level experience in programming and excel in my studies as a result.
However, the actual benefits that I got out of the bootcamp exceeded my expectations by a mile. Surely, the bootcamp enhanced my coding skills and even made me eligible to take a CS project course a year early, but that was only part of what I gained from the experience.
The true benefits of the bootcamp came in the intangibles—by the end of the bootcamp, I was not just a coder, but an actual developer. Using the knowledge I had gained from the first five weeks, I was able to quickly find and integrate unfamiliar modules into the team projects that I was a part of. This experience gave me the confidence that I could learn any programming skill I wanted, whether it be a new framework or even a new language.
Additionally, participating in various pair programming activities and Agile Scrum sprints taught me how to effectively communicate the ideas in my code to other people. Now, I think it’s safe to say that my soft skills as a developer are much better than what they were when I first enrolled in the coding bootcamp. I am also confident that these skills will come in handy when I am faced with a collaborative task in my future workplace.
Making the decision to enroll
The decision to enroll in any software engineering bootcamp — whether it be web development, machine learning, data science — is a huge commitment. While bootcamps may cost less than a semester at university, they are not a small financial investment by any means. You must also be prepared to give up a comfortable everyday life, as you’ll be spending almost all of your time (apart from meals) in front of a computer screen.
Speaking from experience, however, I will say this: if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to transform yourself into a better software engineer, don’t hesitate and just go for it! No matter how tough the bootcamp is, as long as you keep up your determination and diligence, you will succeed. Don’t hesitate to ask your fellow peers and program engineers/coordinators for help. Ultimately, when it’s all said and done, you’ll realize just how much of a better developer you’ve become.
