Reflections at the end of Mod 6
By: Deka Ambia
Tags: Coding, Flatiron School, Ruby, JavaScript, Bootcamp Experience

My Experience, Mod-by-Mod

Mod 1: Basically a continuation of the prework. Oh this isn’t so bad! If it keeps being like this, I can handle it. It’s definitely not as stressful as they said. It got a little bit more rushed during the second week, but I was able to prepare for and pass the code challenge on the first try. Our Mod 1 project went very smoothly save for Github issues (because at that point we were just getting used to it).

Mod 2: I found a video that explained the basics of Rails before we officially started on it (Flatiron School’s program has you start out on Sinatra so you get the basics of routing, and then has you start Rails the Friday of the first week) and having done the project in that video had me a bit ahead for that first week. Without that video, I would have been more lost than I was, and I recommended it to anyone that felt lost. Nevertheless, I was one out of two people who failed the code challenge the first round. It wasn’t due to not understanding Rails, but rather due to not understanding relationships fully and writing out a migration wrong. On the bright side, I learned how to write migrations to change just one aspect of a table rather than dropping the entire table and starting over from scratch every time something had to be changed.

Mod 3: All JavaScript all the time! While the prework did include a JavaScript track, I was told to do the Ruby track in order to prepare for the admissions assessment. My exposure to JavaScript prior to this had been extremely limited. They released labs that covered basic concepts, such as loops, during the weekend before Mod 3 started, but come Monday we jumped right into DOM manipulation. If you read almost any book on JavaScript, DOM manipulation isn’t covered until you start getting towards the end of the book. It was seriously like being thrown into the deep end. It all made me wish I had first looked at JavaScript back in 1999, when I first heard of it, or at the very least had started to learn the basics of coding with it instead of with Python. It’s structured almost entirely different from Ruby and it was a big adjustment.

I also failed the Mod 3 code challenge the first time around. By the time of the retake a week later, I was able to do DOM manipulation in a much cleaner way and finished the challenge in a little over half of the allotted time.

Mod 4: We move on to React! This was described as the most difficult mod by almost every student that went through it. We had a few people who ended up switching to online at this point because they felt they needed much more time to grasp it.

I didn’t find React itself hard to grasp. There is enough documentation, tutorials, and other information and opinions online to get you through almost every situation you find yourself stuck in. There are, oftentimes, React-specific libraries that do exactly what you need to do without you writing your own code. Due to JSX, I found it a lot easier than vanilla JavaScript. The real difficulty about Mod 4 was the labs/homework provided by the school for us to complete. Most were confusing and just badly written; even going back to them with a lot more experience, I still find them confusing. A former student even told us straight up that when they got to Mod 4, they did their own studies rather than follow the official curriculum. I did the same thing and strengthened most of my React skills through this amazing tutorial I cannot recommend enough.

The Mod 4 code challenge was after a week and a half into learning React, rather than two weeks into learning a new concept as it wad for every other mod. I failed it due to something I wasn’t aware was even possible. When we had to do the retake a week later, it was the most stressed I had been in years about anything. I really wanted to finish the program in the 15 weeks allotted, not only because I didn’t want to have to repeat but because I had a potential full-time job offer that was to start the Monday after bootcamp ended. If I failed the retake code challenge, I would have been pushed back six weeks. I would have had to get in touch with the job to say I could no longer begin on the day I had promised (this after I had already pushed back the original start date they proposed because it was during the middle of the bootcamp) and possibly had the offer rescinded entirely. After finishing the code challenge, I prepared myself mentally to receive the bad news. I was 90% sure I had failed because while everything worked, one single feature didn’t work perfectly. Fortunately, everybody in my cohort passed the retake and we all moved on to Mod 5.

Mod 5: In my opinion, the least stressful and most fun part of the program! There are no code challenges and everything is done on your own, unless you choose to ask for help or work with someone else. You are free to do whatever you want as long as you follow certain guidelines: You must use the stack you learned in the bootcamp, plus Redux, which was the focus of the very last two official lessons. All the requirements are written out very clearly. The first two days of Mod 5 are officially allocated to “planning” and not building, as you were not supposed to start building until your project got officially approved, but everybody started building on day 1. To get approved, you were to have a basic outline of what your app did and have some wireframes/user stories ready to show the instructors. I had my idea in the back of my mind since Mod 1, and the whole cohort even knew what I wanted to do, but I still had to put it down “on paper” to make it official. The one thing I didn’t think of was a name. I ended up using my working title as the official name and now it’s too public to go back on.

The way Mod 5 is structured is kind of like a real work environment: You are a junior dev and the instructors are the senior devs; they are sitting there close to you in case you have questions about anything. We had stand-up meetings every day where you discussed what you did the day before, what you were planning to do that day, and one thing that was blocking you. After you were approved, you just worked on your app for the next two weeks until the last Wednesday of the program. That day, the official plan was to check in with the instructors to see if everything was working for the science fair the next day, in my experience, it was just being asked if “everything worked”, I said yes, I was cleared for the next day and that was it. I have heard from former students that functionality and code was actually checked, so this may be the case in other locations and for future cohorts.

The last Thursday of the program is the science fair. Members of the public are invited to the bootcamp to come look at students’ final projects; former students, potential employers, and students’ friends and families are the ones who tend to come in. There are snacks and drinks provided. From the student’s perspective, it’s explaining and showing the features of your app over and over for three hours. It does go surprisingly fast, but you’re still tired at the end of the day.

The last Friday there isn’t any work, just the graduation ceremony. We got a “yearbook” with a picture of everybody from the cohort and with quotes that your fellow students wrote about you/the program in general. This time, only family and friends are invited, it’s a much more personal event. Afterwards everyone in the cohort went out for lunch and drinks.