Life Update: I’m graduating from Coding Dojo!
My Coding Dojo bootcamp experience and reflections
The saying ‘time flies fast’ couldn’t have felt more real in the past eight months at Coding Dojo. My reentry into tech has been an interesting one, coupled with many great — and not so great — moments.
Below is a roadmap of my bootcamp journey for reference purposes:
Nov → Dec 2022: Web Fundamentals (HTML5, CSS3, JS)
Jan → Feb 2023: Python, Flask
Mar → April 2023: Java, Spring Boot
May → June 2023: Full stack Javascript/MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js)
July 2023: Projects & Algorithms
Experience
I’ll admit, I felt like the first four weeks into bootcamp was a major confidence booster since I already worked with the web fundamentals in my senior year of high school. So when I walked into my first stack, which was Python around the end of December/beginning of January, I was also expecting a walk in the park since I also worked with Python both my senior year in high school and my entire first year in university.
And it was a breeze…until I caught COVID for the first time — ever. What started off as a really intense sore throat, quickly evolved to lung-rattling coughs and then, fever chills, joint soreness, and extreme fatigue. The extreme fatigue was what caused me to greatly fall behind in Python. Thankfully, I was able to catch up with the help the TAs as well as attending Dojo Hall, a virtual space to seek help as well as focus on assignments and projects.
Java went by slightly better, since I wasn’t as behind as Python, but admittedly, I feel like I could’ve done a better job, if I wasn’t feeling burnout for the first time — ever. (Java was actually the section I got the lowest score on in terms of exams.) I think one reason why I had a much easier in Java was because my work schedule was a lot more stable during that time than in Python, which helped me attend more of the office hours and lectures.
When I entered the MERN stack, I started to feel more excited, especially about React. I went through my own rabbit hole of learning outside of the curriculum and fell even more in love with the stack because of the potential it had in making beautiful, aesthetically pleasing applications. In fact, the rabbit hole I fell in was so deep that I started to make my portfolio website with React & Vite based off a tutorial I found through JavaScript Mastery. I figured I might as well start now so that way when I started making projects for my portfolio after that stack, I would be prepared to showcase them.
Fast forward to the present day, I’ve add a few more functionalities to my portfolio and added all the projects I did in the month of July. I even created a repo just for algos on Github so I could push myself to have a consistent git commit history to showcase my desire to learn and sharpen my skills.
Reflections
Now that graduation is less than 48 hours away at the time I’m typing this, I am now looking back at not only how far I’ve come but also to share some nuggets of wisdom that have helped me on my journey that may also help you as well.
- Have a planner and plan out your week! Jot down the times you’ll be doing your main activities, work, sleep, etc and then schedule around your routine. You’ll find that you actually have more pockets of time than you think.
- Attend both the office hours and lectures! Build a strong relationship with your TAs & instructors. Those strong relationships will carry you far beyond your time at bootcamp.
- Use the 20 min rule when solving problems. I’ll admit, I’m the type of person who’s used to getting things done quickly — and correctly of course — so I guess you could say that this rule really tested my patience. However, in the long run, you’ll see a tremendous improvement in your problem solving skills, your patience, and your resilience, all really important traits to have as an aspiring software developer!
- Seek help if you’ve tried the 20 min rule and are still unable to come up with a solution. If you’ve tried talking to yourself your code, taken a nap, etc and you still haven’t been able to solve the challenge you’re facing, first try to seek help from your peers, and only seek help from Dojo Hall as a last resort. Piggy backing off the previous point, you really want to grow those skills yet at the same time, you don’t want to remain stuck for too long, otherwise you’ll fall behind.
- Use Notion or Obsidian when taking notes. Both have markdown boxes where you can save coding snippets and take notes based off of that.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate! A lot of tech companies usually use Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, & etc so if you can’t even communicate in the Discord or whatever platform they use to communicate how do you expect to adapt out there? Plus, being active in the Discord server is great in making new friends and networking!
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