Last year I took a coding bootcamp because I was looking for a way to improve my skills as a newbie developer, and I was feeling stuck in Udemy courses and Youtube tutorials.
At first I was skeptical because it was an important time 🕰 and money 💰 investment and I did not knew if I was going to be able to complete it due to my short knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but after 3 months and more than 600 hours of practice, I landed my first dev job!
All the things I am going to mention are based on my experience, of course there are many different bootcamps and the curriculum and difficulty may vary.
Let me tell you a little about this course:
- You had to pass a technical test in order to be admitted. This test was to evaluate your knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript(it was a pretty basic front-end form submission exercise).
- It followed an agile methodology. The topics were divided by sprints.
- The curriculum included top technologies like React.js, Vue.js, Node.js, Databases, etc.
- It wasn't much about theory, it was about practice, which means that most of the day we worked on coding exercises, putting the material we studied into practice.
- It was awesome! 😁
One of the things for which I am most grateful to have learned is team work. Most of the challenges were group exercises and that really helped me to learn how to work and collaborate with others in very real life situations, which today is something that I really put into practice daily on my job.
For my experience I can say that learning to code is all about practice and consistency, so for me, this Bootcamp was the push I needed to make the jump into a developer job.
Coding Bootcamp to Job transition 👨🏻💻
Besides all the technical knowledge that I got from this course, it also helped me to strengthen my soft skills, such as communication, team work, etc, which are really important to land a job(sometimes even more than the technical knowledge). Once the Bootcamp ended, I immediately started having interviews, and luckily I got a job a week after it ended! Today I realize that going from the Bootcamp to the job did not make my routine very different, because the goal of the course is to be as similar as a real job as possible. For instance, we had daily meetings in which each one told what he was working on and what he was stuck on, we worked on real life projects that involved some serious thinking like an e-commerce site, we used GitHub to work on teams, and many other things that were really helpful to learn because today I apply them all the time.
Should you take a Coding Bootcamp? 🤔
If like me at the time, you are feeling like you aren't making any progress, and you want to start your career as a developer, I would highly recommend you trying it. Take into account that you would have to invest a lot of time and hard work(even on weekends probably 😅) but I can asure it is worth it! 🙌🏻 You would be with a group of people who are in a similar situation to yours, and all pushing in the same direction as you, and that is a really cool thing!
This is what I wanted to share today! I would happily answer any questions, thank you very much for reading and I hope it was helpful 😁