2024: Post-Pandemic London
I’m writing this to document my experiences in the Northcoders bootcamp. I’m currently in week 6 out of 13 (just starting the second week of backend) so it is pretty goddamn intense! However, I really found other blogs about bootcamp experience useful when researching what to do with my life. I’ll be honest, it’s tricky thinking about whether to commit to a 3-month stint of maybe not earning an income, spending all day every day thinking about code and rushing through a curriculum at breakneck speed, but so far – it’s worth it?
I came into the big career switch after moving to London three years ago to work in television. I say big career switch, but really I’ve barely started a career. It was going well in TV until the actors strikes in 2023, since then, I (and many others) have been out of work. I really struggled with instability and low wages (HIGH stress) for a couple of years, which really propelled me into a switch to a tech career. I’m looking for stability, longevity and something that is challenging and fulfilling.
My interest in coding has grown over the years. In my uni studies as a fine art student with photography, I became interested in coding for making visual designs that were interactive. I began to follow artists like Ryoji Ikeda:
And Take Shimurata:
And I would try (and fail) to make versions of these crazy glitchy visuals for my own. Coming from a background in design, these works really appealed to me as they felt so abstracted from physically making work, but also so completely non-human — impossible to create with traditional tools.
Eventually, after a lot of research and vetting the good bootcamps from the bad, I found Northcoders’ Software Development Bootcamp – a 13-week intensive software bootcamp focusing on Javascript.
There is a small entry test into the bootcamp, and Northcoders do provide some free JavaScript (JS) learning tools before you take it on. I would also recommend joining a drop-in session prior to your test as the test isn’t so much about your JS ability but almost as much about your ability to discuss and reason the decisions behind your code. I had prior experience with some of the famous self-taught courses (The classics: The Odin Project, Udemy etc) and I would highly recommend giving some of these a go before the test, just so you are familiar with the kinds of questions you will be asked.
Northcoders‘s bootcamp (a.k.a. The Developer Pathway) is a 4 x 3 weeks course (13 in total with careers week) with 4 separate blocks:
> Fundamentals
> Back End
> Front End
> Project Phase
Is it difficult?
Short answer: Yes
Long Answer: Not entirely
Like any institutional study, you get out what you put in. What I mean by this is that you will not understand the concepts in the first day, and that is okay! It might even be on purpose. The content is designed to give you sort of the fundamental context behind Javascript and developing. If you want to look into any of the concepts on the course in more detail, you will have to do it yourself (an essential developer skill you might say). There are, of course, some absolute geniuses in your cohort who have that kind of logical brain that just ‘gets’ it all. I would implore anyone who is like me and can’t help but compare yourself to others, to try and realise that the only person you are competing with is yourself… as lame as that sounds. This is mentioned multiple times on the course, but I will say as someone who has a major hang up about failing, or imposter syndrome, it is actually useful to realise that these peers are amazing for learning from, rather than competing against.
As far as the course material – I would say it is pretty comprehensive. Through the fundamentals block you are hit with ‘katas’ to strengthen up your vanilla JS skills (it’s actually mostly problem-solving skills). In this block I would usually end the day feeling extremely drained and brain-foggy, I expect mostly as this was a muscle I hadn’t really stretched in years. You are also taught industry tools and frameworks, including Node.Js, TDD (jest and supertest), MVC, express.js and mostly are working in pair programming.
I actually found this to be incredibly useful, as my cohort are really friendly, respectful and much more logical than me. It might seem like a chore at first and you really do slow down on the katas, but it does expose you to many different problem-solving approaches and avenues you just wouldn’t comprehend otherwise.
Shoutout to Simon for all the soundtracks to code to!
Most of the material in the fundamentals block you will not finish… And this is by design. You are taught a concept in the morning, have the afternoon to practice, and by the next day you are onto something entirely new. I do feel that this means the concepts aren’t entirely locked in, but I think a large part of developing isn’t knowing how to expressly do something, or to be able to memorise algorithms, but to know where to look when you want to solve a problem, and maybe more importantly, how to recognise what KIND of problem you need to solve.
When you get up to the backend block, the style of teaching shifts from day-by-day, fly by your pants concept learning to more of a building on the knowledge from yesterday. You begin to work on databases, building a seed function all the way to a fully tested server and RESTful api. This is where some of these concepts you learned in fundamentals really shine. I’ve actually just finished deploying and hosting my first back-end (server and API). It feels good to finally finish something, even though it is still a massive WIP. I’m looking forward to polishing up and adding a front-end soon.
– JK