What did I learn from completing a 6-month coding boot camp?
It humbled me in many ways
I did it for the wrong reason
I took an online full-stack web development course because I was seduced by the thought of earning a six-figure income.
It was tedious work though. Each day I stacked digital bricks without end and then dreamed about coding in bed at night.
When I finally did finish a project, I was unable to appreciate how I had improved as a programmer or admire the work I had just done.
Instead, I only saw the unyielding stuck-out bits of ugly white mortar in need of a good chiseling off between all those lines of JavaScript I’d written.
My mantra every day for those six months was, “Just keep doing the projects, finish the course, find a job, work five years, and we’ll be set. That’s it.”
That wasn’t it. That wasn’t even close to it.
When the boot camp ended, I never coded again.
I can make myself do something I don’t enjoy for a few hours a day.
I can’t make myself do something I dislike for most hours of each day, day after day.
It took a while for the curriculum to sink in
Most of what I was taught didn’t make sense when:
the instructor taught it the first time
our study group tried explaining it to one another
the teaching assistants attempted to use analogies I could grasp
my tutor met with me one-on-one and went over individual projects line by line
The weird bit was, further down the road, when I was working on something new, an old bit of the curriculum would finally click into place and make sense in my mind.
It was as if I was halfway through a cooking course and, as I learned to barbecue, I noticed that my onion-dicing technique had suddenly and drastically improved.
I spent some time during the boot camp trying to figure out why I was learning this way and if there was any way to prompt it, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
I’m not that smart
Before the course started, I plodded through several hours of free coding resources each day, took dozens of pages of notes, and watched coders do problems on YouTube.
This went on for a few months.
Yet it was disheartening that I’d done all that work and was barely able to keep up during the first two weeks of classes.
Then I was ingloriously behind and stayed behind for the next five and a half months.
Not completely lost, but well off from where I wanted to be, frustrated, muddling along at my own pace until the course wrapped.
The most embarrassing part?
This was a “part-time” coding boot camp, meaning we only met three times each week, three hours at a go. It was designed for adults working full-time jobs, with busy lives, kids, and other responsibilities.
I treated this online course like my full-time job and still floundered.
The flip side of perseverance is stubbornness
We started the boot camp with 50 students, more or less.
By the last class, there were about 35 of us.
That number should have been lower.
For starters, I had a lot of classmates who should have dropped out and gotten a refund. While I scrambled to stay above water, helped organize a study group, showed up early to classes, and had regular tutoring sessions, there were people in my cohort who did the bare minimum.
I only became dimly aware of these classmates through working with them on group projects and seeing firsthand how poor their skills were or hearing them ask the teaching assistants questions about assignments I’d completed months before.
I should have dropped out too, once I had the gut feeling coding wasn’t for me, but I didn’t because I’m stubborn, and I liked the structure the boot camp gave my days and weeks as I waited for my visa to process.
I’m grateful to have participated in the course, to have been in the orbit of some very sharp and interesting people for a short while, and to have a basic understanding of how websites and applications are built. Those are all very good things.
But I’m not happy with myself for walking all the way to end of this road with my head down before raising my eyes and realizing, “Hey, where am I exactly?”