What’s a Gold Badge Worth in Development?
A recap of my first three weeks in a JavaScript bootcamp
First off, holy buckets, Eleven Fifty was not kidding when they say this program is a “bootcamp.”
I regret that I’ve not had more time to update you on my journey from no coding experience to someone with a mild amount of coding experience, but there is much truth in the statement that “I haven’t had time.” That being said, I have officially completed the first month of my JavaScript course and earned what Eleven Fifty has dubbed the “Gold Badge.” It’s something I can wear proudly on my LinkedIn profile, but there’s been a lot of learning that has taken place in the past four weeks. I want to briefly go over some of the biggest takeaways from the course so far, both from a technical and career standpoint, and look forward to next month: the much more prestigious Blue Badge.
It Really is Another “Language”
As frustrating as you think it is when your mother-who-used-to-be-an-English-teacher corrects your speech, she’s nowhere near as picky about your syntax as computers are when you’re trying to speak their language. The easiest way I’ve found to describe learning programming to someone who hasn’t taken the leap is the metaphor of learning another language. You’re learning how to have a conversation with a computer, so that you can express what you want the computer to accomplish, and the computer can understand exactly before doing it. First, developers need to learn the basic words of a given language, in my case JavaScript, before they can start to learn the syntax of those words. How do you conjugate the word “run”? What’s the correct way to list an array of objects so your function can filter through them? Where is the proper place to put a comma within this sentence?
(Comma placement, in particular, has caused me to lose hours of productivity just this week alone. The entire server application I was working on broke on me because I forgot a single comma in this one function. Very fun, would hunt down again!)
I’ve used this metaphor for learning another language multiple times because the people who have asked me about my progress always profess that they’re not “tech-y” enough to “get it,” but these same people have usually gone through some sort of foreign language education during their time in school. Obviously, there’s a certain level of technical knowledge that you need to excel in this environment, but it seems like people often overestimate it.
Learning is More Sticky When Your Project is a Passion
The first “major” project that we were given by our instructors centered around learning to interact with APIs and demonstrating that we could successfully fetch data and display it on an HTML page. Simple enough right? Well, when my instructor mentioned that there was a PokéAPI that could be used for projects, I don’t remember hearing much of the rest of her lecture. The Pokémon series is particularly close to my gaming heart, being one of the first games that I ever played back when I was a youngin. The idea that I eventually landed on was “Pokémon Rock/Paper/Scissors” and I think I got landed pretty close to my original vision! You can take a look at it here and mess around with it on your LAPTOP OR COMPUTER (NOTE: We’ve learned about responsive design, but I didn’t quite have time to program it into v1 of this app, so please do my ego a favor and experience it on a larger screen!).
Even though there were many lines of code that went into this project, it never really felt like work because of the subject matter. All the time spent trying to figure out the enormous if/else statement that runs the logic of the rock/paper/scissors game was paid off every time I saw a fire type correctly be picked over a grass type, but lose to a water type. Frustrating thoughts of trying to find the perfect font eventually lead you down a rabbit hole of “I wonder if there’s a way that I can import a typeface that looks like the original GameBoy?” and bugs in the code that lead to some sprites not loading eventually become a way to learn error handling and a chance for you to work the easter egg MissingNo. into your creation. The code isn’t perfect, but I’m so proud of it that I already have plans to come back to this when I know more and make updates to it. I can safely say that had I not been covering this topic for this project, I would not be as comfortable with API interactions as I am currently.
Time Management is More Important than Anything Else
I’ll stress this point for the second time, but Eleven Fifty really is a coding “bootcamp” in the strenuous sense of the word. There’s just so much information to learn in three months that there isn’t much time for slacking off. During the first week, I was routinely studying, doing homework, and other JavaScript challenges until nearly midnight trying to keep up with the pace. One thing that all of my classmates and I had to learn rather quickly was how to best manage the time that we had. We weren’t going to make it by not paying attention to lectures about for loops or DOM, but even beyond that, we had to learn how to manage our time as we worked.
In a recent class, I asked our Gold Badge instructor if she had any kind of flowchart for “most important pages and files to set up when building an Express Node server” and she replied, “just work by building out one functionality at the time.” While I was frustrated at the time by her seemingly dodging my question, it was something that I’d already been practicing in my projects up until that point. In my PokéRPS project, I knew that I wanted it to randomly select a type for each of the Pokémon on screen, so I didn’t focus on anything else until that was finished because I knew that it was going to be a core part of my app. Once I had that done, then I went about building the system that randomly selects a Pokémon from the list that had previously been randomly selected, so on and so forth. It can be immediately overwhelming to approach a blank project that has many requirements and not know where to start, but these first few weeks have taught me how to segment into smaller, more accomplishable pieces that you can stitch together into a more comprehensive project at the end.
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As an Enneagram Type 2 I feel compelled to apologize that I promised to post more during my bootcamp, but I had neither the excess time or energy to sit down and crank these blogs out during these first few weeks. Blue Badge starts in earnest next week and we’ll be learning React which I’ve heard is very fun and exciting, but that usually also means there’s plenty more for me to learn. I’ll work on being more communicative during the rest of my time here, but class comes first!
If you have questions or don’t want to wait until the next time I have time for one of these posts, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram!
