Code Bootcamp Week 6 - Updates

On the 27th January 2020, a few days after successfully interviewing for an Apprentice Software Developer role at AppLearn, I walked the through the doors of Code Nation feeling very nervous, excited and raring to get started on a three month coding bootcamp to kickstart my new career.

Although it has only been six weeks, I cannot believe how quickly that time has passed and how much I've learnt in such a short space of time. Whilst I had some coding experience prior to starting, nothing prepared me for the intensity and depth of teaching, code-alongs, projects and challenges - and I am loving every single second!

It's been a whirlwind of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more recently React, and I've coded a few projects a long the way that I want to share in this post.

Dice Game Challenge

The first challenge that required combining HTML, JS and CSS was a short dice game challenge with simple rules:

• To win the game, you must roll a score over 21
• If you roll a 1 at any point before passing a score of 21, you lose

KeyCode Challenge

I really enjoyed the Key Code challenge, taking inspiration from https://keycode.info/ and pulling everything that we'd learnt about event listeners and styling together to create an application that display information about keys that are pressed on a keyboard.

React Style Challenges

As an introduction to getting used to how React components works, we were tasked with creating visual copies of websites such as the Netflix FAQ pages, BBC Newsbeat and Auto Trader. Whilst the finished result is purely for visual purposes, I am so proud of these!

Newsbeat Mock

Netflix FAQ Mock

Auto Trader Mock & code

We are moving on to React props, state and hooks next, and although I'm finding it a little confusing at the moment, I'm putting in lots of extra studying time to wrap my head around it and it's all starting to make sense - component based languages are definitely a new favourite!

I'm also working on my own portfolio website (soon to be shared but super secret until then - watch this space) and looking forward to cracking on with Angular and Node when the time comes. My personal goal at the moment is to update weekly with my achievements to not only showcase how far I've come, but to remind myself that although the path I'm taking is a little bit rocky and paved with self-doubt sometimes, I have a very bright future ahead of me and I am edging closer and closer to it, one day at a time!