How to Survive a Web Development Bootcamp

(Image: John Schnobrich, Unsplash)

Final week of web development bootcamp. ::Gasp:: I’m truly shocked by how fast this whipped by, but the good news is this gal survived and conquered, and with no breakdowns suffered — just a few migraines and some minor frustrations! That, in itself, I consider a huge win. So, now, as an almost-alumni reflecting on the past nine weeks, I thought it’d be a good time to assess what I’ve learned or what I wish I’d done, and bestow some of these hot tips to future bootcamp students, who are no doubt anxious for what’s to come.

1. Be prepared to put the social life on the back-burner. I was told to expect about 30–40 hours of homework a week. I didn’t put a timer on, but that number’s quite right. If you’ve been through anything in life, this definitely won’t be the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but 30–40 hours a week is an investment of time and energy— don’t be one of the inevitable people who say, “I didn’t expect it to be so immersive!” As a good friend says, “It’s called Web Dev Bootcamp, not Web Dev 1-hour Hatha Yoga.”
2. Build your support system. Talk to developer friends or anyone in the industry willing to chat. Ask for advice. Ask about their struggles. The more information you have on what lies ahead, the easier you can build a tangible picture of your future, set some practical goals. And also, if any of these people are offering to help, which guaranteed they will… ACCEPT: their one-minute of expertise might save you from 24 hours of frustration! In the short time spent in this world, I’ve already learned that developers love problem-solving and truly get their kicks from helping others. Consider it a win-win situation for the both of you! (Confession: I reached out to 5 developers for guidance on my React project. For real.)
3. Get rid of that blue glow. Order a pair of blue-light filtered glasses or at the very least, install f.lux to shift the colour temperature of your monitor. Anything helps! I had only gotten a week into bootcamp when my eyeballs felt like they were about to dislodge, but f.lux helped tremendously. Take care of those peepers!
4. Practise thinking like a programmer. For those of us not accustomed to thinking programmatically, the brain needs a little bit of a workout. If you have any spare time pre-bootcamp — even if it’s just on the toilet! — log into a fun coding app, like Google’s Grasshopper, m1m0, or Code Wars. Think about arrays and go over the different ways to manipulate them. The more time you can train your brain on these concepts, the easier JavaScript will be!
5. Read up on React or whatever framework you’re studying. If you’re like me and you think a degree of comfort with basic jQuery means you’ll be able to comfortably understand and write a project in React within a week, you may want to reassess that assumption. If you do master it in a few days, good on you! But it doesn’t hurt to zip through a few online tutorials in advance. Your brain will thank you.
6. Challenge yourself. Acknowledge your strengths, bring them to the table, explain your thinking to others, but be open to letting go, jump into things you don’t know, and step yourself through your thought process as you fight with new concepts yourself. It’ll be the best way to get better at something!
7. Ask questions. Learning a brand new language in a compact period of time is difficult: be easy on yourself! If you have a question, there’s guaranteed someone else in class has the same concern and is thrilled you had the bravery to be vulnerable yourself. Throw pride out the window: You’re here to learn!
8. …But also, don’t ask questions. Many introductory JavaScript courses leave students crying, “What is the purpose of this? Why are we console.logging ‘Hello’?” Just keep in mind JavaScript is best taught by breaking the concepts into tiny introductory steps and may not make sense until a few days in. Sometimes it’s just best to accept the process — just make sure you understand the basic steps and then just strap yourself in for the rest of the ride.
9. Make friends. Break the developer stereotype and reach out, connect with your classmates. Isolating yourself, especially when taking an online bootcamp, is super easy to do, but given that interpersonal skills are super important in any modern work place, it’s good practice to get comfortable with people! Besides, your classmates will be a source of sanity and comic relief in the chaotic weeks to come, which you’ll definitely need. And who knows… They may possibly be your future coworkers, managers, and references in the future!
10. Step back! Take five! My most successful breakthroughs happened after having some time to myself to think. Encountering a problem and spending 5 hours moving the same lines of code around the page won’t help, but a break certainly will. Get up. Make dinner. Take a walk. Talk to a friend. Listen to your favourite podcast. Stare at the ceiling, if you like! The answers to your 5-hour problem can be found in some mysterious places.
11. Get comfortable with breaking things. The perfectionist in me always wants to get things right, immediately, but I quickly realized perfectionism isn’t possible without testing things out, especially at this stage of career infancy. I started looking at things differently when one of the geniuses in my group kept wanting to break things on purpose, just so he could learn something new. If there’s one trait I wish I had from the start of the bootcamp, it’s this one.
12. Get comfortable with knowing nothing. After pivoting from a creative industry, I figured I could flush imposter syndrome down the toilet, but after following a bunch of developers on Twitter the past nine weeks, it appears that this field has it even worse! The key to feeling okay about all this, though, is knowing that everyone feels this way.
13. And remember… if you come out of bootcamp knowing nothing else than being an expert in Google, well, at the very least, you’ve mastered the first step to becoming a developer, right?

Good luck, future boot-campers.