The Journey Day 11
Coding Bootcamps. Are they really worth the money?
You hear so much about coding bootcamps these days. They promise different stacks based on the direction of study you intend to follow. From front end, to back end, to full stack and game development, you hear a mixed bag of promises that can really cause you to pause when you consider these claims under scrutiny. “Just how good could they be?”, is what I thought before signing on board with one bootcamp and taking an internship with another.
It was early early August. I remember the day. It was exactly 40 days before orientation for my selected bootcamp. I had decided to take full stack web development program and had heard the names General Assembly, Hack Reactor, Fullstack Academy, Lambda School, and a few others but those were the curriculums that really interested me. I did my research and decided on Lambda school. Their setup, curriculum, and timing really aligned with my life while the setup of class structure and ISA really convinced me that now would be the time to jump into this.
You may be asking “What’s an ISA?”. An ISA, or income sharing agreement, is basically a loan for the school to cover the $30k cost. After you graduate and begin to make more than a set amount of money, you pay a percentage monthly for three years to settle the loan. If you if you haven’t gotten a job in a field utilizing your full stack education then the debt is wiped out and you pay nothing. That, in and of itself, was the sole reason I was able to partake in the beginning of this journey on Sept 21, 2020. It was this reason that provided the opportunity to find out how truly and amazingly transformative this experience would be for me as I underwent the process of becoming a web developer.
The curriculum in broken into 4 units comprised of two sprints for Lambda. These are completed in groups called cohorts. You are assigned a track team comprised on one person from each unit. This track team represents each stage of the full stack education. At the end of a unit comes a “build week” project where each team member works on a part specific of their current unit. Unit 4 builds the database, Unit 3 handles the backend, Unit 2 handles front end using react and until recently Unit 1 handled css and basic html setup. Currently, unit one does career development instead which is very useful in getting your resume, Linkedin, and interviewing skills up to speed.
I had heard from recent graduates how vastly different their development skills had become in comparison with what their starting expectations were. I knew it would be pretty profound change but I had no idea just how fast it would happen. We zipped through html, css, and introductory javascript. To say that I saw my life flash before my eyes would be an understatement. Judging by the drop off of about half of my 130 person cohort at this time, I would say I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Javascript was no joke.
I studied, and googled. Youtube surfing for hours occupied my life. I spent time watching countless tutorials on .map, .filter and other methods. I read documentation that, at first glance, appeared to be Greek. Pair coding with fellow cohorts helped as we pushed, pulled, and willed each other across each finish line. The effort needed to change a mindset from whence you came to that of a developer was starting to take shape in ways that, unbeknownst to me, would be very useful in the coming days.
At Lambda if you don’t catch a unit properly you can either choose to flex back to the start of the unit and do it again or you can be force flexed if the instructors deem it necessary. By the end of unit one my 130 person cohort was down to 11. Seeing that number by straw poll really made the settling feeling of having really accomplished something at this point really take roots and I’m pretty thankful made it through with a really solid understanding of javascript that came from many days of hard work and collaboration.
So when I got the call from GameDevHQ saying that I had been selected to take the GameDevHQ program as an intern, I immediately jumped at the chance. I figured learning C# and Unity would be a fantastic skill to help me achieve my goal of entirely changing the way we experience website. I would be able to take a 2D web interaction and morph it into a 3D, multimedia experience. Sign me up.
Now working on my third week of game development I see the importance of bootcamps. My starting experience was hard. I’m not going to lie. There were definitely parts of the experience that took some smoothing to make workable but all in all it has been a fantastic experience. Today, as I went from taking my shields up a notch with pulsating animations, I learned the way to set cases when utilizing a spawn manager so that you don’t have to take on pages upon pages of new code, I see the developers mind hard at work.
Today also consisted of maintenance and code cleaning. Cleaning code, making sure that it’s dry, clean, and reusable, is a skill that I picked up in javascript ad Lambda School. Understanding how to declare a variable, or how to loop through code in a function are concepts that I learned in web development yet they serve as context to understand the coming syntax to achieve the same goals in game development. This while game development shows me how to make a react game more realistic through condition statements that set a more realistic outcome.
As I go back and forth between javascript, React.js, C language, and C# it it can be mind boggling at times. But, if there is one thing that coding bootcamp makes you, it would be gritty. Much like military boot camp, you have to get down and dirty at times as you attempt to blow through so many concepts in machine gun fire speed and succession. You learn to shift gears quickly instead of needing to install an entirely new gearbox to shift mind states.
As I approach month three of the boot camp experience I would definitely recommend it for a person who is a go-getter. There’s a reason why they are called bootcamps. Even at GameDevHQ, aspiring developers are encouraged to do their research, dig into MDN, and watch countless Youtube tutorials on the art and science of software development. If spending long night’s grinding sounds like too much, I would definitely tell you to keep moving. It’s not for the faint of heart.
In short, I love it. GameDevHQ and Lambda have been amazing experiences. I am definitely learning an incredible amount of skills taking both classes (as well as Harvard CS50 intro to computer science) and can see quickly how in addition to technical skills, mental agility is a key component to the success of aspiring developers. Throwing yourself into the boot camp experience can be daunting at first but do yourself a favor. If you do choose to go this route, stick with it, you’ll be glad you did. I know that I am.
