An Honest Remote Bootcamp Experience (In Covid Times)
I originally applied for a normal on-campus Bootcamp at the beginning of the year. But covid and quarantine made it impossible so decided to postpone with wishful thinking that around October things will be better. Well, I was wrong and ended up doing a partially remote Bootcamp at Le Wagon Lisbon.
As for prep work, I completed Ruby, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Codecademy courses. On top of that Le Wagon has an excellent online tool to prepare for Bootcamp with video lectures and quizzes.
First Week and New Routines
We started to receive a weekly schedule for the on-campus experience. Because of Covid, only a limited amount of people could go. Usually, every person had 3 days in a week. Classes started at 9:00 sharp and all of the classes were on Zoom. After class, you had daily challenges and at 17:00 there was a live code with more complicated examples. I was working on usually 12:00–21:00 shift before so this forced me to make adjustments in my daily life. Actually, it was really hard for me to get a good night's sleep because I used to sleep late and my brain was coding at night especially in the first week.
This week, I realized the difference between doing an online course and a Bootcamp. After lectures, we received daily challenges that should be done. And immediately working on the things you learn makes a great difference. You have a buddy (a fellow student) to help you in case you stuck or of course, you can ask for a teacher to help if you really have no idea what is wrong. Sharing struggles helps you to stay focused and motivated. Also, challenges give you a sense of success and drive you to complete. It was very significant in the first week. I wanted to complete the tasks even after the whole day of intense coding, at night I worked on them.
Some may say the first week is the hardest one in terms of sudden changes in your routine and pumping new information into your brain. However, I enjoyed this week the most. It felt good to learn a lot of new concepts and to be with people who are like me.
I didn’t drink coffee before coding, now I drink 3 coffees a day.
Creating a Base
After the first week, most of us got used to the system. We started to learn more complex parts of Ruby. But things were becoming more challenging as we progress. Around this time I started to feel going to campus or staying at home did not make much difference. And to be honest I sometimes preferred to stay at home because Bootcamp was really tiring and having 30 mins more sleep in the morning was very appealing. Of course, to be able to go physically is a really big plus in terms of having social interactions and a better experience overall.
With Object-Oriented Programming, we moved on to SQL databases, and after that visual parts started. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills to complete our base for upcoming project weeks.
Before project weeks we had an idea of which parts we love and contribute to the projects. I loved every part of the base creating process. After this, I felt more confident and ready to combine the knowledge to create a working app.
Projects
This where we started to combine everything we learned. We used the Ruby on Rails framework to create our apps. I had a group of 4 people all from different countries and different backgrounds. We had remote and on-campus experience as a group and honestly, the remote experience was as good as on-campus. Actually being remote and working as a team made me better at using Slack and doing daily stand-ups.
Summary
If you think you have the commitment and desire to do a Bootcamp I think remote is almost as good as the original. But the best of both worlds is certainly partially remote Bootcamp. You have the flexibility to work as you please and having that is really important for something as intensive as a full-stack web development Bootcamp.
