Time To Solo Fly

The journey I started at Flatiron School months ago is about to end in a week time. Even Though it’s challenging and stressful, I can say I really enjoyed my stay, each and every bit of it. The environment is awesome, love and respect to all the instructors, coaches and my cohorts.

I am going to miss our daily standup, DQ sessions, the lectures, the Feeling Sessions, Mock challenges & reviews and us struggling to prepare for Code Challenges. … but passing through all those processes and struggles let us develop the muscle required to become a good full stack developers. Now we are grown ups and they are letting us go solo flying …… its exciting as the same time scary.

In this blog I would like to take time to write a general overview of my experience and pinpoint some suggestions for whoever wanted to join Flatiron School or any other coding bootcamp.

PreWork

First and foremost, once accepted, please prepare well on any preparation course the school is offering. I was accepted in the immersive program and there was a pre work worth of 100 hrs, which you’re required to at least complete 80% before joining a class.

The concepts discussed are like a building blocks or foundation for the entire course and beyond. Take time to understand them well, I promise you, it will make your life v.much easier. Some of the concepts are; collection data structures like arrays and hashes and manipulating them using their built in methods. Trust me, they will be your friends forever.

Completing Labs

The course is structured in four phases, the first two phases focus in building the backend part of web development and the last two are designed to teach you front end web development. Under each phase there are plenty of labs and exercises to practice and actually process the concepts. Sometimes you get overwhelmed by the amount of labs being released each week and fall behind. But pushing yourself to complete them, will make a huge difference in closing any gap in your understanding.

Patient/Persistence

To tell you a bit about the content of the course, we started with an object oriented programming language ruby, it was user friendly and easier as compared to other languages, mostly covered representation of real world instances as objects and building their relationships(Models). Once we used to it, we then introduced to another dynamic topic, rails … its a server side web application framework written in ruby, it has got an MVC [Model ,View, Controller] structure. You will need to think of not only building your Model, but also creating client side views that will involve Restful routes, creating Controllers… and so many others.

Same goes to the last two phases, where phase III is Vanilla Javascript, you will learn about DOM structure [how to read, amend, create them], adding event listeners and sending and receiving data to the server.. its an imperative programming where it will show you step by step way of doing something. Then came robust React that encapsulate the details, and doing what Javascript does in a declarative way. You will create a reusable components, use state hooks to hold and render datas and pass them to child components as a prop.

All this concepts are thrown unto you in a very tight and fast paced environment, it will be alot to get your head around them. You might feel like bumping your head against a wall. But persist and keep on going, as repetition is the key to understanding.

Ask Questions

It is obvious that you will not understand everything within the time given, so Flatiron provided an awesome supporting environment, where we have a discussion questions(DQ Sessions) to brainstorm our ideas and sharpen our understanding. In addition to that there is a pair programming session, where we are able to solve a challenge together. Those are nice outlets to ask questions and clear your understanding. Slack is also another way to shoot your questions to the group. These all are in addition to asking directly the instructors and coaches, who are open and there to help you.

Use any medium, to ask your questions even though it seems silly, be vulnerable and don’t stay with your doubts.

Dedication/Cutting your social life

Focus, cut your social life and avoid any destruction as they won’t go together. Learning programming is like shifting the way you think. It requires quite environment and concentration. You need to loop through your thoughts to build something. Be aware of it.

Google/Documentation

Develop your googling skills as every question you have, is already answered by prior developers. You can easily put the error message you got and search. Among so many results, check the one related to trusted sources like documentations and personally referred more to stack overflow.

Below is the list of useful documentation.

Ruby: -https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation

Ruby on Rails: https://guides.rubyonrails.org

Javascript: - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript React :- https://reactjs.org

Hope you benefited from the above tips and see you on my next blog!!