My XP with the bootcamp so far.
Tags: beginners, programming, challenge, braziliandevs
Published: 2021-12-10 20:08:06

I am finishing up Phase 1 of the Software Engineer bootcamp at Flatiron, and today (12/10/2021) I watched presentations of final projects for the cohort that is graduating this week. While I was watching the presentations I started feeling some sort of anxiety and excitement thinking about my future projects, specially, my final project.

But I am not going to talk about the project I worked on with my partner this past week, or give any hints about what I am thinking my final project will be. Today I am going to talk about how phase 1 was for me.

Starting with the thing that most of us are afraid of, the Code Challenge. I knew there was going to be a code challenge at the end of the phase, but I did not know exactly how that was going to work, and how I was going to feel about it. When I finally got to it, I felt that I learnt a lot during the phase, but that wouldn’t be enough to pass the challenge. 

My code challenge name was “Flatagram”(you might have done the same one). I was very nervous reading through the explanation and checking what the deliverables were. Right from the start I knew I was able to complete some of the tasks easily, but would have to work hard to figure out the ones I was not so confident about. 

The easy tasks were to fetch the image received from the server, including its title, likes and comments when the page loads. The tasks that were more challenging for me to figure out were to make the “count likes” work properly, and append new comments to the page.

Putting the technical part aside, one thing that bothered me during the challenge was that I had to keep sharing my screen the entire time. At the same time I understand the reasoning behind that, I felt like someone was spying on me.

The other thing I want to mention here is my experience with the lectures so far. I will be honest with you. Some lectures I felt that I was following along and learning so much, but other I was completely lost. It may be different for each person, but I noticed that I was able to follow the lectures a bit better whenever I was able to complete the labs related to that specific lecture beforehand. Overall, the first week was the toughest to follow I guess because the amount of labs I had to finish in such a short time (my bootcamp started on ThanksGiving week, so we had 3 days to go over everything for that week). Things got better in the following weeks and I was able to follow along better.

The last thing I will add here is related to time management. The bootcamp is very intense and time consuming, so I am having a hard time to combine personal with bootcamp life. Adding  more complexity to that, I moved from NY to LA 6 weeks ago, which makes my days start very early. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining here. I kind of like the way it is as I like to get things done early. 

My issue with the time management thing is that there is so much to learn that I feel like 24 hour days are not enough. Sometimes I caught myself spending hours trying to figure out something, or studying about a specific lab that I end up not giving the same amount of attention to other subjects that are equally important. 

That’s it for today’s post. I will keep you update as I make my brain more used to coding and move forward with the bootcamp.  

Thanks for having me! 

  FePaiva