Too Basic to Understand - Happy Bootcamp Story 55 of 100

"D`oh!" says Homer Simpson fans, everywhere.

TL;DR: When something is so obvious that most of us don't even understand it - the advantage goes to those who focus on the "D'oh!" stuff first.

Educated, But Not Ready

Please excuse the promotional sounding bits - but Trevor Page founded our bootcamp because he graduated from a university Computer Science program and found himself unprepared to work with code, on the job.

What's relevant about this is the "D'oh!" part, from our perspective? Ignore the obvious at your own peril. Sure, you know the science-ish part, now that you are edumecated, but what is it that you are being hired to do with that? Oh ... coding.

After seeing dozens of our graduates placed in coding roles, we know that a straightforward focus on coding itself, works.

More Fundamental than Coding?

If you have a CS degree or even another profession, and then train as a coder - you have a huge advantage because now you can combine both.

But is there something even more foundational than coding? And is there an advantage to learning that, as early as possible?

Coding is a means to an end, for the enterprise. Your employer doesn't care about the code except as a means to an end - and that end is moving data around.

Happy Story - Moving Data Around

We can make it easier on our students to learn, by just explaining why, rather than how. You are coding, sure. There is science, sure. Lotta cool stuff everywhere. Just understand why you are learning this stuff, and why they want to pay you to code.

You're moving data around. You're just a means to an end. Be realistic, don't lose focus on the "D`oh!" part of the equation.

Data. As defined by something that looks like a row in a spreadsheet.

Is this cruel and demeaning? Possibly? Even so, it gives the student a minute to breath, take the pressure off. "I'm just moving data around" is less overwhelming. Now you're seeing the common thread to all your efforts.

But Wait! There's More!

Once you spin off into the world of "What are we doing here, anyway?" you can go down a few more rabbit holes to really see how silly and fundamental the work we do can be.

There's CRUD or Create Retrieve Update Delete - the basic operations on a row of data. Yawn.

There's sort, filter, transform - the basic stuff we do to data to make it usable for an enterprise and/or it's customers. More yawn.

And there's where it goes to and from when we move it around. Databases. Front ends. OK this is really boring. But guess what, if you don't know what we are doing here, things can seem much more overwhelming than they really are.

Relax. We're just moving data around. Front ends, to databases. Sorting, filtering, transforming. We can do this, even if it feels boring, now.