The Top 3 Things I Learnt About Myself at Coding Bootcamp
I recently completed the Makers Academy software development bootcamp, remotely. A 4 month intensive introduction to being language agnostic, learning hard things quickly, and computer programming of the object-oriented persuasion.
It was ridiculously good, and ridiculously hard work.
Here are the top 3 things I learnt about myself during those 16 weeks:
How to overcome frustration when working in a team.
It turns out I have extremely high standards and can be pretty hard on myself if they’re not met. And I’m task-oriented — so I’m not happy if we’re not attending to the task at hand. If things aren’t progressing, that mix is not conducive to a good team atmosphere.
In one team project, we hit so many seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. Things did not move quickly. For the first week I was very much projecting those high standards onto everyone else, and getting quite frustrated and anxious in the process.
At Makers, there is an emotional intelligence coach who runs a whole curriculum of exceptionally useful workshops. She does one on one chats too. I booked a chat, and we got to the bottom of the frustrations I was eager to stop manifesting.
The long and short of it was: stop being so hard on yourself India, be really sweet to yourself instead.
With some journalling to explore my mind a little better, and a lot of practice to get into a new habit of self-niceness, week two was so much easier.
From then on, I’ve found myself able to:
- avoid an anxious response to negative situations, moving straight to the ideas for solutions instead
- take time to do a tutorial for new technologies, before diving in to the code
- create space for all team members ideas and blockers to be heard in group meetings
- allocate regular time to give and receive open, honest feedback
I’ve absorbed more than I think I have.
The bootcamp is centred around self-led learning. The coaches and curriculum enable you to work out what the best route of learning is for you, and pursue it doggedly until you know what you need to.
For the ‘pre-course’ 4 weeks (done part time, alone, before meeting the cohort and coaches properly), we learnt command line and Ruby basics.
For the first 4 weeks of the full course, we learnt Ruby in much more detail. This enabled us to grasp several important programming concepts:
- test driven development, testing for behaviour over state
- OOD essentials including: single responsibility principle, encapsulation, polymorphism, dependency injection
- how to debug anything*
- process modelling
- how to use databases in your apps
*we were incredulous seeing this as a goal, but it turns out it’s all about process, and anything really does mean anything!
Then, we hit JavaScript week.
It was incredibly confusing at first, porting our new language abilities over to a further new language. But then it got so exciting.
Suggestions to speed up the process include:
- list what you know in the language you already know; try to learn the equivalent in the new language
- create a basic working program using a tutorial
- try doing a walkthrough typing everything out (no
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) — this is awesome, it gives you muscle memory for the syntax you’re working with
The first time I was shocked by how much I’d absorbed was JavaScript week two. After another week in Ruby, we switched back to JavaScript — for only the second week ever — and I was writing things from scratch that were working... What?!
The next time was during code quality week. This week you do a review*, process workshop*, get feedback*, and do all challenges alone. Which is a huge change of pace.
Review = 1 hour video call with external person. During that time respond to a brief and code live in front of the person. Receive verbal and written feedback on your process.
Process workshop = 1 hour video call with peer. Each person takes 25 mins to resolve a kata. The other person feeds back on the process followed, and you can send your recording to a coach for further analysis.
Feedback = Coach reads through your challenge code in detail and provides notes, tips and questions.
I spent the first half of the week doubting everything I wrote. Everything I’d written on day 1 & 2 got deleted and rewritten. But, after feedback, it turned out my doubts were unfounded.
Actually trusting myself was the way forward. Phew.
Goals and reflections are where it’s at.
Before doing this course, I’ve done a lot of self-led learning on different subjects. I love to learn. It’s exciting, it gets the brain cells dancing.
However I hadn’t settled on a structured way to keep track of my learning. There were no reflections. No easy way to see how far I’d come. It was do the thing, learn by doing it, and when it’s done its learnt.
OK, so that does work, but it’s not very satisfying. And it doesn’t help when trying to articulate what you’ve learnt to someone else.
As soon as we started week 1 full time, we were encouraged to start a tracking platform for our goals.
Morning peer group meetings were used to set daily goals in Slack. Makers sets course goals, split into weekly goals. You choose the daily goals.
- Write a goal.
- Think of ways to achieve that goal.
- How will you evidence the goal completion?
Every. Single. Day.
At first it’s a bit alien working this way. It’s very intentional. Focussed. And, to probably nobody’s surprise, it works like a dream.
I chose to use Trello to create a sort-of kanban of goals. Each new day has a card filled with the goal details. It’s added to the week, with a coloured label. As I complete actions towards the goal I add comments. When it’s done, it gets the green label and moved to the done pile. At the end of the week I move all the goals back to one column and start a fresh. This has been excellent to look back over and I thought it was working pretty well, until I levelled up with…
… reflections
Ohhhh yeah. After a great chat with cohort colleague Arav, I started using Bear to write out weekly reflections. They include what I learnt, what I didn’t cover / understand, and what I want to carry over to next week.
That really changed the game.
Reflecting on what you’ve learnt, and setting goals for what you want to learn, are major help in learning a broader range of things and tracking your progress. That’s probably not major news to you; and I guess I knew it in theory. But it was only at Makers that I started putting it into practice.
Now I can explain to you what I’ve learnt, rather than just knowing that I know it. 😊
