Life at a coding boot-camp

16 weeks in to the Technigo frontend boot-camp, there have been highs, lows and a few melt-downs! Here are some of my experiences so far.

From the very first day, we were coding. Assigned into teams of 10 people on our two intro days (we keep the same team for the entire boot-camp), we broke down into groups of 5 and began our intro days project. Here we were introduced to mob programming and the scrum framework. A new way of working, with a team of new people we had just met. Knowing that we were to demo our finished project to the whole class. It felt like we were thrown in to the deep end. But with just 24 weeks to become a frontend developer, there was no time is to waste.

CSS flexbox was the theme of project number one. This was also the beginning of the coding dreams! I remember dreaming about flexbox every night that week! Probably due to frustrated, late nights, trying to get a grip on this newly introduced layout model.

Week number four is another project that always stands out. The Pizza Bot! This was our first full project using JavaScript with the aim to build a text-based pizza bot that takes an order, calculates cooking times, a total cost and returns this to the customer. This was also our first using pair-programming. It stands out for me, because this was another tough learning experience.

It takes time to build the logical thinking and problem-solving attributes required when coding. And one thing that you notice at a boot-camp is that the repetitive nature really helps to make things stick. Five weeks on, and we were building React apps. But still making use of the same conditional statements that seemed so tricky on week number four. Each week we are introduced to something new. You study it, you use it and sometimes you fear it. But by constantly using these new tools you get to grips with them quicker than you think possible.