My Journey Into Tech: Part 3 - From JavaScript Foundations to Full-Stack Applications

Introduction

Welcome to my third article in a series of posts taking you through my journey from the world of dietetics to development. Thank you once again for stopping by and taking the time to read this. If you haven’t already read my other articles, you can start there if you want to get an understanding of my journey up until I started my bootcamp. Otherwise, jump right in to this one, where I'll be talking all about my 13-week software engineering bootcamp experience at Northcoders.

Fundamentals

As my (catchy?!) title suggests, I started my bootcamp journey with very basic JavaScript foundations. Going back to learning full-time was a bit of a shock to the system, but I thrive on routine and schedule, so the 08:30 starts were no bother for me, and I had all my exercise planned to fit around the start and end of each day. The first few weeks I was diving deep into JavaScript, learning git and GitHub along the way, and figuring a lot of it out with my pair through pair programming. Pair programming was a completely new concept to me. I learned how to be a good driver and a good navigator and really enjoyed speaking to other people to try and come up with a solution between us or just to see things from someone else’s perspective. Our mentors and tutors were all genuinely the most supportive and lovely people ever, and we were able to raise a request for help whenever we needed to. Unfortunately for me and my pair the request for help came very early on, after being unfortunate victims of the dreaded merge conflict on day 2 of bootcamp! But the ability to make mistakes or get things wrong in such a safe and supportive environment was absolutely crucial to my learning and development throughout the course, and I believe this is what enabled me to be able to learn so many new concepts and skills at such a pace.

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Back End

The next few weeks were all about the back end. Before I started the bootcamp, I didn’t even know the difference between the front end and the back end. It very soon became apparent that there was much more to applications than meets the (non techies) eye! I will not lie—I found it really difficult to grasp first of all. Most of the time, when I’m learning, I want to be able to understand every corner of a concept and be able to see the bigger picture of how it fits in with what you see. There was just so much to learn. I knew I had to take a step back, break things down, and trust that I would see the bigger picture in my own time. The new concepts of databases, servers, requests, and responses were so alien to me. Through many different learning methods, including continuing to pair programming and asking lots of questions in our seminars, it started to make more sense! One thing that I found invaluable was test-driven development and using the red-green refactor method. Writing integration tests when developing endpoints really helped me understand the shape of the data I should be sending and what I wanted to send back. I learned about different types of errors and how to handle them properly so that in the future I would, as far as possible, receive useful information about what went wrong, rather than it being the generic “something”...

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Front End

It wasn’t long until I started building a front end to integrate with my API. This was one of my favourite parts of the bootcamp, as I not only was building the client side of the application, but I got to further appreciate the fruits of my labour on the back end. Seeing the data I fetched from my API come through in the response object in the browser console was genuinely so exciting. And not only that, I could now decide exactly how I wanted to display the information to the user. Being able to build a front for the world to see and interact with was so much fun and also a lot more difficult than it looks. Front end really surprised me, as there is so much more to it than just styling and building components. I realised there were many more aspects of what makes a good front-end application that I could still be writing about tomorrow if I had the time: accessibility, user experience, performance, security, responsiveness, maintainability, and, of course, does it solve the problem/(s) that the client wanted to be solved?

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Group Project

The group project phase was an important and fun end to the bootcamp, and it really wasn’t until this point that I realised how far I’d come in only 10 weeks and how much I had learned. Being able to work with four other fellow students to plan, develop, and deploy a mobile application was something I could never have imagined being able to achieve in such a short amount of time, had you asked me at the beginning of, or even halfway through, bootcamp!

My favourite thing about project week was being able to simulate working with an actual software development team. Being a software engineer requires so much more than just software knowledge, and I really enjoyed getting stuck into other aspects that will be required of me in a role. I contributed my ideas and thoughts when planning and developing the project. I both participated in and led daily scrum meetings. I pushed and pulled work to and from GitHub and learned that merge conflicts are even scarier when they involve other people's code! I helped create and update tickets based on our discussions and progress. Being able to work in a team and share our difficulties, help others and be helped, and celebrate our successes together was great, and I am really looking forward to these aspects when I land my first developer job.

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Challenges

Code dreams - dreaming of coding—sounds nice, right? Except when it’s every night, throughout the whole bootcamp. It wasn’t a challenge in itself, and I’m no sleep expert, but I do believe my body was giving me a sign to keep things a bit more balanced (more on that in my second point). While I believe it was just a symptom of being so immersed in coding, it really made it hard to feel like I was able to switch off when it was occupying my subconscious as well as a lot of my conscious thoughts!

Keeping pace -? we all learn in different ways, and especially when learning completely new skills and in a new industry, it’s not always easy to know what method of learning works for you. My exercise schedule went out the window. I had to turn down social obligations. I had to read around topics/documentation or practice coding at night to keep up. I was being exposed to new concepts every single day and then again the next day, and the next, and so on. For me, it was a great way to propel my career into software, to expose myself to real industry practices and learn alongside other people and collaborate, but make no mistake—bootcamps are every bit as intense as they sound. I had to adjust my expectations of the non-coding things I could achieve or participate in in a week, as I wanted to make sure I gave it my absolute all for the duration of the bootcamp.

Wins

Learning quickly - As I talked about in my previous articles, I came from a background in healthcare and only started coding a few months prior to starting bootcamp. I never ‘dabbled’ with code in any sense when I was younger, and I don’t have a STEM degree. I just luckily found my passion eventually, and I continue to pursue it. Being able to learn quickly and knowing how I work best definitely helps when you’re learning on someone else's schedule and are completely new to almost every concept.

Not being afraid to make mistakes or ask questions - One of the things I enjoyed most about my bootcamp experience was feeling safe and supported to learn and to make mistakes, and meeting people who were also at the beginning of their software journey. I had great tutors and mentors, and this was pivotal to my understanding of certain concepts during bootcamp. I asked lots of questions, I double-checked things, I challenged assumptions, I rephrased things to check my understanding, I asked for help from peers and mentors, and I spoke up when I didn’t understand something. Taking ownership of my own learning journey during bootcamp and making sure I was fully immersing myself in the learning process was crucial to evaluating and consolidating my knowledge.

Conclusion

When I started my bootcamp journey, I had only a basic understanding of some JavaScript and absolutely no idea how full-stack applications are actually built and integrated, how the internet works, or how software developers actually work day to day. Learning all this and more with a variety of fellow students and learning methods was such a valuable experience that I will never forget, and the whole experience was great fun. It was probably the most intense 13 weeks of my life, but also some of the most important as it has allowed me to kickstart my future career. Despite the intensity and the coding dreams, I completed my bootcamp with the knowledge that this was exactly what I wanted to do as a career, and it sparked the hunger and motivation to begin the next new chapter of my life: building on my newly acquired software skills and starting the hunt for my first role in the tech world!

In my next article, I’ll dive into post-bootcamp life and what I’ve been up to in the world of software since graduating bootcamp, which I’ll be posting next week. In the meantime, I’d love for people to share their experiences of their own bootcamp, or maybe you haven’t done one but you are thinking about hiring bootcamp graduates or looking to sign up for one (Northcoders highly recommended!). If you're intrigued by my journey and are looking to add a dedicated and adaptable software developer to your team, please feel free to reach out to me. I’d also love to connect with people to learn about their current or past career and learning journeys, so please reach out, connect, and share.

Thanks for reading!

Nicole

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