My experience in coding Bootcamp
By: Rahel Hagos
Tags: Experience, Hard Work Pays Off, Dos And Donts, Failing

Benefit of joining coding Bootcamp:

Computer science college students usually spend about four years to learn programing. During this four years, they cover a lot of unrelated subjects to programming and gain limited skills than what a companies looks for. On the other hand, Bootcamp takes a little over four months and provides very important skills that is relevant to the professional-world.

My experience as full-time software engineering at flatiron school:

When I joined flatiron, I didn’t have a lot of programming back group except a little of HTML and SQL server. I found the intensity of the course to be way beyond my expectation. You are given multitude of information in one lecture. I had to adapt to the speed and do extra work than the students with coding back group. Class starts at 9AM and ends at 6PM, from Monday to Friday. During these eight hours, we have lecture, an hour lunch break, sometimes pairing lab, sometimes solo lab. At the end of every phase, which takes about two to three weeks, we have a test and a project. During this intense fifteen weeks, it is advised not to have a job but to concentrate on your class, homework labs, tests, blogs, and projects.

My Dos and Don’ts-I have been there and I have done that:

Don’t burn your self, because it is not a one day race, keep a steady pace and get enough rest. Don’t overwhelm your self with how many home-works needs to be completed but take it one day at a time. Not getting enough rest lowers your learning ability. Staying up late and not getting enough sleep has negatively impacted my ability to learn and participate in class because I was too exhausted. Getting enough rest is crucial in-order for your brain to process the new information. Do what you can do, don’t be afraid to ask and don’t be scared to make mistakes.

Students come with different backgrounds, some have C++ programming background and others don’t have any; Therefore, do not compare your self to others and stress about how much less you know. Don’t stress of how much you don’t know because you will not know everything; you just have know how to figure it out. Have a positive mind, work as hard as you can, and do your best to have stress free learning experience.

Failing code challenge:

Failing code-challenge/test can be overwhelming and devastating; as a result some students might quite. We all have read about successful people’s failure stories, just because they did not give up, we are calling them successful. I want to motivate you and let you know that failing a test does not define you as a failure or grade your mental capacity to learn. If you love programming, keep trying harder because there are many students who failed and repeated, and came back stronger in their understanding and graduate. Failing a test is not failure, not getting up from that fail is a failure; Don’t give up!

What to do to prepare for Bootcamp?

Work harder to understand the pre-work that you are required to finish before you can join a cohort.

Try to learn little bit of HTML, Ruby, Active Record. I will link some videos that I think are helpful, which will give you some incite into how the classes look. These videos are not required by any means by the school, they are just what I think as helpful video to give you a head start.

These videos are by Lyn a Flatiron teacher, who have her videos available on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8W3IyXQxuB3Rf1v3LnKpiA/videos