"Let's Build Our Own" - Happy Bootcamp Story 78 of 100

Improbable idea. Completely impractical. In other words, a great plan.

TL;DR: What could be argued as the dumbest idea a student ever had, has transformed our program into a "go to". A place where they want to be.

Just Out of Reach

When Alex J. suggested putting our focus into building an app instead of just helping each other with assignments and answering questions, it was a bit like saying "Why not just do something impossible instead of focusing on what we can do.?"

We are coming up on 2 years into the experiment, and it has proved to be just as impossible as we knew it would be. And yet, that seems to be the attraction.

So why does everybody love it so much? Why is building our own app, an app that we ourselves now use in production to monitor our own participation as students, loved so much?

Because We Use It Ourselves?

Is it because we are "eating our own dogfood" or is it something bigger?

If one listens to how the students explain it to each other, it's not the dogfood thing, though they do mention it as a credibility issue or a point of reference.

Time and again they bring up "... and this is what we will be doing on our future jobs." The absolute curiosity and desire to learn that exact process, down to the Pull Requests and each click of the Merge branch button, this is a very visceral experience that carries a lot of meaning for each participant, apparently.

Impossible, Like Real Apps

It's shocking how little progress we have made in a couple years. Or, is it?

It's mostly the more junior coders, and only in our daily sessions for maybe a half hour while being guided by seniors, that even get to work on this codebase. So our lack of progress is to be expected.

Maybe that's where this is most like the real world - we all become accustomed to how long it can take a group of people to build an app in the corporate world.

What is possible, however, seems to be what the students love about this process. "I did ... today, and I did it with everyone watching, and now it's part of our app. Pretty cool" These are the feelings that cause shifts in the way we see ourselves.

And this, from Alex J's impractical suggestion, is how lives have been changed forever. People that might have dropped didn't, because they saw themselves as capable. That small shift becomes a big deal.

More Dumb Suggestions, Please

Making a dumb suggestion might be the best thing any of us can do, today.

The world is changing really fast. No telling where this thing is going to go. But here's one thing that we can know. We will be iterating on what might have seemed like dumb ideas before someone tried them. Amazon and Tesla prove that true every day.

We use our little app, every day, in production. Yes, it's little. Yes, it won't impress anyone. That isn't the way it is viewed, by the hands that built it.