Five Steps to Prepare for a Coding Bootcamp
Enrolling in Thinkful’s bootcamp was easy. All it took was one $12,000 click of the mouse, and that was it. The chips were down, and I definitely felt a strong sense of “failure is not an option”. I needed to set myself up for success as best as possible and attempt to learn as much as I could on my own before my first day. I needed a plan.
The problem was…there. is. so. much. to. learn. I wondered what to focus on. Should I just drill basic JavaScript? Become as comfortable as possible with HTML and CSS? Or, should I go nuts and try to get a jump on React?
Here’s what I settled on doing in the ~6 weeks between enrolling and day one of my bootcamp:
Part One: Learning How to Learn MOOC
This one was a little bit meta, but I wanted to get myself back into a learning/studying mindset. I figured that this course would do a great job reminding me of the skills and strategies I learned in college, as well as hopefully pick up some new ones.
Also, I thought it would be a good exercise in checking my ego a little bit and forcing myself to focus on absorbing the material. I’m very prone to “illusions of competence,” as they discuss in the course, and wanted practice recognizing that and making sure I actually was learning and retaining the information I was studying.
Part Two: freeCodeCamp
This became my “job” every day leading up to bootcamp. I can’t even remember how I came across it. If you were the one who recommended it to me, I cannot thank you enough!
I decided I wanted to get through as much of the Responsive Web Design and JavaScript curricula as possible before bootcamp. I set the ambitious goal of actually finishing the freeCodeCamp “Certifications” in each.
I also dabbled a bit in some of the front-end framework curricula. I took to jQuery well enough, but React absolutely fried my brain. Those frustrations lead me to Samer Buna’s React course on Pluralsight, which was incredibly helpful in getting me to wrap my brain around React. It also did a great job teaching some of the ES6 concepts I had been struggling with. Highly recommend this course!
Part Three: Drill baby, Drill!
I wanted to get as many reps in as possible solving problems with JavaScript, so that I would know “how to think” better from day one of bootcamp. Obviously, there are tons of options out there, from LeetCode to HackerRank, to Codewars.
I bounced around a few, but ended of focused on Codewars for two reasons:
1.) I’m a sucker for gamification.
2.) I joined Madison Kanna’s code book club.
They do a Codewars problem together every other week. I still haven’t been able to join in on a Sunday coding session, but I see talk of it in the Discord all the time. It’s a fantastic group.
My Original 5-Step Daily Plan
This was the schedule I came with, which I attempted to complete daily.
1. ) Do a section or two of Learning to Learn, until finished with the course.
I didn’t do the assignments for certification since I wasn’t paying for the course, but I did do all the quizzes and took extensive notes.
2.) Work through a section of freeCodeCamp.
I would do an entire section if small, a chunk of a section if it was huge. I wanted to get through as much of the Responsive Web Design and JavaScript curricula as I could, which meant a fast pace.
3.) Go back and take notes on the freeCodeCamp section I completed a day or two before.
I added this step after completing Learning to Learn to give myself more spaced repetition and interleaving of the material I was learning.
4.) Complete at least one exercise on Codewars, Leetcode, or HackerRank.
I would do more if my freeCodeCamp material for the day wasn’t very logic heavy. This step was very dependent on my level of brain-fry, but I always did at least one per day.
5.) Read some documentation/written explanations.
It could’ve been anything. W3Schools (I know I know…), MDN documentation, React docs, etc. After a few days, I dropped this from my daily plan. I had added it on the suggestion of my Thinkful prep-course mentor, but I realized it was not how I learn best
All this amounted to a pretty full day, 5–6 hours of focused work.
Did I stick with this plan? Hell no, not perfectly! My goals when I set out were ambitious to say the least. Seriously, I thought I would complete the entire freeCodeCamp Responsive Web Development certification, AND their JavaScript certification, which supposedly take 300 hours each.
But still, I managed to complete over 500 lessons on freeCodeCamp, and get to level 6kyu on Codewars.
I felt great about my knowledge base going into bootcamp, especially as someone with no real software background.
Nearly two weeks into it now, I think it’s safe to say that the preparation is paying off.
