How I’m Making the Most of My Coding Bootcamp
Get Your Money’s Worth
tl;dr: Just enrolling in a coding bootcamp won’t make you a software engineer, but it’s not a bad way to get started if you have the time and money.
Late last year, I realized that I was no longer happy with my chosen career path. I was working with great people, supporting excellent causes, and I got to travel to all kinds of cool places (Liberia! Peru! Mozambique! Poland!). Still, I couldn’t help feeling that I wasn’t having enough impact, making enough money, or developing enough personally to justify the hours I was working.
After much deliberation, I decided to leave my job and enroll in a twelve-week Software Engineering Immersive program or “coding bootcamp”. It wasn’t an easy decision to change careers. I believe my past experience in project management and communications is relevant and will serve me well, but it’s up to my future employers to share that perspective. Otherwise, I’m just a bootcamp graduate with three months of relevant coding experience.
Despite my anxiety and my rapidly dwindling savings, I’m happy to report that this has been the best decision of my life. Never before have I experienced this rate of personal growth or found a skill I enjoy learning and exercising quite as much as programming. Plus, it’s a rapidly changing field, so there will always be more to learn. Still, I know not all of my classmates share my excitement. For future participants, I want to share some pointers on how to make your bootcamp investment worth it.
Important Disclaimer: I am single with no children, my friends and family have been supportive and understanding that my time is limited for these few months, and I have no other major responsibilities competing for my attention. I think you can still have a good bootcamp experience without these things being true, but that definitely gave me a leg up in this program.
Without further ado, my top takeaways from coding bootcamp:
Stop thinking of your bootcamp as work
Just because you go to a place from 9–5 and sit in front of a computer doesn’t mean you’re at work. You’re not being paid to provide a good or service; you’re paying someone else to accelerate your learning.
You’re the client.
Your biggest responsibility is getting the most out of your investment, whether this means getting additional help or deciding that your time is better spent working on a personal project or writing this blog. You decide how to spend your time, so make it useful. Don’t be a passive participant in the experience.
If something isn’t working, provide feedback! Your instructors don’t want to waste your time or money either, so share (kindly and constructively) what could be improved for the rest of your course and for future cohorts in the same program.
Don’t limit yourself to learning in class
Do whatever is needed to meet your graduation requirements and get post-graduation career support (if offered by your bootcamp — which it should be), but take charge of your own learning path.
If you want more or better practice with something, there are endless resources online. My classmates and I have gotten a lot of value out of Colt Steele’s courses on Udemy, but there are plenty of free and affordable resources online for getting more practice.
The learning curve of the bootcamp will be cyclical, but if you feel like you’re not being challenged at some point, try to use your extra time and energy to pick up new skills. Especially if you’re starting with JavaScript, there are endless libraries and frameworks you can learn to unlock new possibilities in your projects, and most of them have great tutorials and documentation to help new users get started. Try teaching yourself:
- React — We actually learned this in class, but I got a head-start and built a mini-project with React a week early, and it made the next unit much easier for me and gave me some flexibility to explore other topics. React’s docs are fantastic and the tutorial provides good practice working with key concepts like state, props, and the component lifecycle.
- Google Maps API, Mapbox, or Leaflet — Maps are cool.
- Electron — JavaScript isn’t just for web development anymore. I’ve heard some developers complain it’s slow, but it’s pretty cool that you can use JavaScript to build desktop apps now. Plus, major companies like Slack are using it for their own successful products, so it’s definitely worth learning.
- React Native — Want to build mobile apps in JavaScript for iOS and Android? You can do that too. I’d recommend learning React first, but the learning curve from there to learning React Native seems very manageable. I’ve only done some basic tutorials, but I definitely want to explore this further.
- D3.js, chart.js — If you’re into data visualization, D3 definitely has a learning curve, but the things you can build with it are awesome. I’ve heard chart.js is a bit more accessible if you’re looking for an easier entry point, but I haven’t explored it as much.
Learning any of these — and being able to demonstrate that knowledge — will (fingers crossed) help you stand out to potential employers, and it’s a better indicator of your ability to keep learning in this fast-paced field after formal instruction has ended.
Learn more than programming
It’s easy to focus all your attention on learning a new language or framework. That’s where you’ll feel the most rapid growth in your abilities, and it will probably be the most satisfying. Still, it’s equally important to learn the tools, mindsets, and workflows developers use to collaborate on a daily basis. Ultimately, you’ll need to learn whatever systems your employer dictates, but it’s still great to have a more-than-cursory understanding of:
- navigating the command line
- Git/GitHub, including common workflows
- Accessibility
- Testing & test-driven development
- BEM or some other methodology for standardized naming of components
- VSCode (or your preferred inferior text editor)
Build personal projects
Look, you may not want to show off the Pokedex you built by querying the PokeAPI (no shame — I’m still trying to catch ’em all), but that’s transferrable knowledge. Take what you learned and build something that feels more relevant to your future career and interests. It’s good practice and you’ll almost certainly learn something new just by exploring a new API. Or better yet, create your own API once you have some more knowledge of back-end programming. Even if you don’t feature it on your portfolio, it can still be on your GitHub demonstrating the range of your skills.
You should come out of any bootcamp with a few main projects that you built as part of the program’s curriculum. These are usually great projects to showcase, but you may not have more than three or four by the time you graduate. If you have spare time, try to add more polish and features to the projects you have, but also have a side project or two to add to the collection. You’ll get more practice and employers will be able to see that you’re motivated to keep learning and growing outside of class.
So is it worth it?
For me, the answer is an unequivocal yes. I had tried teaching myself programming before I enrolled, but it was too hard to know where to begin and consistently dedicate the time needed while I still had a (more than) full-time job in a different industry. By enrolling in a bootcamp, I gained the time, curriculum, network, and support I needed to begin this new phase of my career without feeling entirely unprepared.
Still, it’s a lot to consider. Between tuition and missed paychecks, it’s an expensive choice to make, particularly if you have other responsibilities. If you’re self-motivated and have a knack for programming, you may do fine self-teaching, but it may take longer before you feel comfortable entering the workforce.
Whatever you choose, try to engage in the broader development community in your area (assuming that exists). I’ve had several conversations with more experienced developers at Meetups and they’ve all been happy to share their expertise and guidance with aspiring junior developers.
If you’re looking to make a change and you enjoy exercising your creativity and logic to solve problems, programming seems like a great career path. Attending a bootcamp is one of many ways to get started if you can spare the time and money. Just make sure you use that time effectively, and hopefully you’ll value the experience as much as I have.
