Experience from a Bootcamp

After a long break my wife wanted to get back to work. She joined a boot camp as a full stack developer. After a struggle, successfully completed her course recently. Her success made me wonder if we could learn something from the boot camp’s methods of re-skilling average developers and make them productive in the modern stack with lesser effort and time.

Organization wise, I know we are doing lot  of similar attempts, like Hackathons, and others. But I had questions like, can we implement something like boot camp and re-skill some of our developers? Should we hire good college graduates at a low cost and train them for a month? Or if an employee is between projects, can we re-train them in a month and deploy them again.

The entry criteria for this boot camp is to be able to build a complete, working, prototype with a front-end, middle tier and back-end level of complexity within couple of days. At the end of 3 weeks, the individual is required to complete a similarly complex application in 4 hours in “Belt exam”.

Boot Camp does not teach basics, it expect the candidate to read material and use Stackoverflow to figure out the problem. Of course they encourage to talk to other students, but other candidates are also under pressure to complete the course, so it falls heavily on the candidate to complete the boot camp with what every help they get.

When the course started, I assumed that I can help her and she can pick up. But as course progressed I realized that even I had lot of shortcomings. For example, I attempted an exercise initially over the weekends, and took 2 days to complete. And was wondering how she will be able to manage this. So I got hooked to this and every weekend I completed 1 exercise and she carefully reviewed them and understood it. It exposed me, how much I don’t know. It was almost like that this boot camp taught me 3 stacks.

The structure of boot camp is every 3 weeks you have a “belt exam” on one stack and they have to build an entire application in 4hrs, if they don’t build it they will be given 2 more attempts in that week, and if they still not complete it, they will be sent back to take the entire course again.

Below is the course structure if you are interested:

The course structure is, they will be trained in 3 full stacks from, 6 stacks they offer, .Net, Java, MEAN, Python, Ruby and Swift. In each of these stacks, they will give 3 weeks to prepare and 1 week to attempt the “belt exam”.

One such examples is Water BNB, just like Air BNB we need to build a Water BNB, people should be able to post a property for rent near water bodies, people should be able to rent the property and finally people should be able rate the property and also vote for the person who has rated.

This example covers every aspects a medium complex application development.

• The person should understand, Entity relationship design in database pretty well, One 2 one, one 2 many, many 2 many. Not just from database perspective, but also from ORM perspective   
• They should understand, for example in Java how JpaRepository, CrudRepository works, how does Query works
• They should understand, transaction from application perspective
• They should understand authentication, authorization and frameworks like Spring Security
• They should understand HTML5, CSS, Responsive web design
• They should understand Angular or one of the JavaScript library
• They should know Maven, Gradle, how to deploy to AWS or Heroku cloud and present it

Another example is about event management, ability to create event, ability to show interest in the event and ability to rate an event. Again we have lot of the above elements.