My Awesome Experience Completing the 1st Phase of Flatiron School's Live Online Boot Camp
Tags: flatiron, beginners
Published: 2024-03-08 01:22:26

Well...

  Where do I begin? Let me just say that the past month of February has been an absolute journey for me. I've gone from knowing next-to-nothing about JS, HTML and CSS to completing a Group Project (which consisted of creating our own app that accessed both internal JSON databases and External APIs; more on that later) in 3 days! 

  To start off, after I had applied to Flatiron, I honestly had next to no idea what I was getting myself into. Look people, if you're going to apply to this boot camp, (or any educational institution, for that matter) give yourself PLENTY of time to get both your paperwork, as well as prep work done before the first day of class. This will help immensely, as well as reviewing and practicing all of the material that is covered in said prep work that you had any difficulty with. Should you heed my advice, you'll be set for the first week and it'll set a good mindset for the weeks to come.

  Don't let this scare you off if you're looking to apply; the first couple weeks are definitely going to be stressful, since IT IS A BOOT CAMP, after all. Make sure to eliminate/uninstall ALL distractions (video games, recreational narcotics (if you do those), etc.) beforehand and dedicate all of your free time towards focusing on the material, that way you stay on top of your studies and even get ahead of the pace that's set in these first 2 weeks.

  Now, onto MY personal experience. With the only coding experience under my belt being a single semester of C++ Programming Fundamentals at my local community college, I found that I had both a knack and newfound love for coding. After speaking to several of my friends in the industry, as well as a few others, I was not only advised to attend a boot camp, but was recommended Flatiron School specifically by several of them. The application process was simple: send in your initial application, take an aptitude assessment, attend an interview with one of Flatiron's awesome staff members, and should you pass, begin your journey with Flatiron. During the start of this journey as I mentioned before, you'll need to both sign AND submit documentation (as per pretty much any educational institution). While it's important to get the paperwork done first, the prep work is equally, if not more important to get started on. There's 40 hours of it, so GIVE YOURSELF TIME! Anyway...


 After finally finding my diploma hidden inside a spare closet under some boxes 2 weeks before the first day, I was ready to start the prep work, which was about as time-consuming as I thought, but not too difficult. I did my utmost to resist the urge to try and rush through it; trying to rush through, as I found out, will only make the entire process take even longer. You WILL NOT understand the material and coding labs assigned to them (granted you have no prior experience with writing code) if you attempt to do so, so don't rush yourself when you're reading the material and you should be fine.

  A week after I finished the prep work, our first day of class came! We spent a little bit of time introducing ourselves, chatting and getting an idea where everyone was in terms of how much they knew about coding. After a lunch break, we went into a lecture for a few hours and then wrapped up the end of the class day with Student Orientation. I finished that up, studied the class material on Canvas for 4 hours, ate dinner and got ready for bed. I did well until Thursday of the first week, in which I only spent about 2 hours studying after class, which only put me slightly behind, but my actions leading into the weekend would only put me further back. I neglected to study Friday and Saturday, leaving me scrambling to finish what I'd previously told myself I would be doing the past 3 days, unable to finish all of said work in time and ended up missing an assignment lab and 2 quizzes. Not a super big deal, but I wasn't okay with the fact that I let myself fail something that wouldn't have taken that much more time to do, had I not neglected my studies.

  Week 2 was... stressful. I spent Monday and Tuesday staying up until all hours of the night trying to catch up on the material. I was kicking myself for having slacked on my studies, as I was barely understanding any of the material being discussed in the lectures, on top of getting next to no sleep. I was both mentally and physically exhausted, and I was in a fairly bad state of mind. Given that I had put my foot in the door and was already committed to this boot camp however, I told myself that I wouldn't give up and that things would get better. As Wednesday came around, I was presented with a Code Challenge that made my heart sink. I felt like I was handed a rifle, dropped out in a battlefield with almost no prior training and was told to fight. Granted, it was mentioned on the calendar provided to us in Canvas, but I still wasn't ready for it in more ways than one. Despite this, I "threw myself into the fire" and got to work... only to spend 4 hours after class that day writing code and completely forgetting to enable the local db.json server in my Ubuntu terminal, unable to test it. I thought it was something entirely different and went to bed that night with an empty file in VS Code after another 5 hours of troubleshooting a problem that wasn't even there. The next morning, I was able to view everything from a new, not-exasperated standpoint and immediately find my problem. After scrambling some code together that got mostly everything to work, I spent 30 minutes on clean-up, only to be bless with a 3-hour extension on the deadline. I then spent another 2 hours on debugging critical issues and another 30 minutes on clean-up, turning in the assignment just minutes before the cut-off.

  THE RELIEF! It felt like the most rewarding thing ever: seeing a webpage work with code that I'd wrote was like viewing the birth of your first child. 

...I mean...

...maybe not THAT rewarding...

...but you know what I mean.

  I spent the rest of the evening patting myself on the back, taking a well-deserved breather that evening from both code and distractions and went to bed early to regain the lost sleep from earlier in the week. Friday's morning lecture went over a more in-depth view of both its and Thursday's material (external APIs), since Thursday was mostly spent on the code challenge by most members of the course. The second half of the day introduced us to our last major grade for the phase: our Group Project. This consisted of using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to construct our very own app from scratch, utilizing both local databases and external APIs, as I'd previously mentioned above. Friday's morning lecture went over a more in-depth view of both its and Thursday's material (external APIs). 

  The second half of the day introduced us to our last major grade for the phase: our Group Project. This consisted of using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to construct our very own app from scratch, utilizing both local databases and external APIs, as I'd previously mentioned above. My group members, Ben, Christopher and Dainis along with myself spent the rest of the evening debating on the topic matter for our project based on our common interests. After having a good chat for a couple of hours, we decided on creating an app that would give you a song to match the mood for whichever city you typed in. The app would take in your location via a search bar (cityName, stateName, countryName), use a geo-location API to acquire the latitude and longitude of that city, plug those coordinates into an external weather API, and return the current weather (i.e. "Sunny", "Cloudy", "Thunderstorms", etc.) via a handy option to return a NOAA-standardized weather code, 00 thru 99, based on the weather conditions for that area. It would then use that weather code to assign a value to a mood variable, plug that into our getSong function, and return the user a random song fitting that mood from the numerous ones with the same mood properties existing in our local song JSON database.

  We spent all of Monday and Tuesday making great headway towards the final product, but unfortunately hit a major roadblock on Wednesday; we had the U.I. and everything else practically finished by then, but we were unable to get the recommended song's info nor link properties to render properly inside the button. Wanting to keep myself busy and keep us moving, I took the reigns on troubleshooting this JavaScript hullabaloo.

  I was in too deep. 9 hours later, and I had still not made any progress on this error that kept popping up. Ignoring my group members' advice to take a break or pass it off to them throughout that time, I stubbornly refused. By 10:00PM, I'd finally given up and threw in the towel. I passed it off to my group members, frustrated for not passing it off to them sooner and pair-programming after a break to make more efficient progress. (I know to do that now; really glad to have learned this early on) I woke up early that Thursday after having a literal nightmare about coding, (I don't wanna talk about it; apparently a girl in my class had a similar nightmare, but this was something about hair growing out of her tongue and the action of plucking these hairs would throw critical errors in her brain's code) I got together with my group and just under 2 hours before the project was due.

  It was crunch time. Ben (our team lead), Chris (our API guy), Dainis (our pair-programming wizard) and yours truly (JS Guru (in the making) and debugger extraordinaire, save for Wednesday) were all ready to rock. After hearing that Ben and Chris had stayed up late the night before and had almost solved the rendering issue after having erased and re-written a good portion of our code conglomeration, Dainis and I finished off the last third of it and debugged the entirety of our JS file for any remaining issues while Ben and Chris took the liberty of cleaning up our webpage in CSS and making it look awesome, with all of us finishing just moments before our presentation; if completing the code challenge was that rewarding, you can imagine how finishing this project felt for me and the rest of the crew. We had just finished our project literally seconds before it was due and were giving virtual high-fives all around. Feeling proud and a bit goofy, we all went and grabbed random garb from our closets to dress up in for our presentation in order to give our crowd a good laugh at the start, kept it professional where it mattered most and finished strong.

  I am writing this as of the same day that we completed this project, and am truly happy with the work that I accomplished over the past 3 weeks of this boot camp, including with my group in this recent project. It gave us a little bit of a real-world feel for how things go in the industry, though I know there's still A LOT more to learn in these upcoming weeks. However, I'm looking forward to it, despite all of the previous bumps in the road. I know it's not gonna be smooth sailing for the rest of this program, I'm motivated now more than ever to dedicate myself towards completing this program and finding a job where people in the industry are as just as excited as I am to code and work alongside one another.