Over the last month, I have been a part of a beginner level coding bootcamp called “neogcamp”, which is conducted by Mr Tanay Pratap, who is an engineer at Microsoft. This bootcamp is part of Tanay’s mission to get 100 of his students placed into programming jobs in 2021.
The camp itself is split into 2 parts- levelZero and levelOne.
levelZero is the freely available component which teaches the fundamentals of web development through YouTube live sessions. It consists of 9 exercises and only upon completion can one apply for the next level.
levelOne is the closed community, paid part of the course that takes a deeper dive into web development and aims to take a participant from a complete beginner to a full stack developer.
You can find more details about the camp at their website.
I have currently completed levelZero and would like to share the lessons I learnt from this experience, that aren’t directly related to the technical aspect of the camp, but rather with the general learning experience.
1. Failure is imminent!
What? How can you say that? I don’t want to fail!
I’m guessing some of these thoughts ran through your head right now? We’ll you wouldn’t be alone. It’s honestly frustrating when you put in a few tries at something and it doesn’t work. Being an Indian, we’re taught from very early on that failure is a bad thing. Our education system abhors failure and anyone who fails too much is treated as an outcast.
But here’s the thing about code. It’s almost impossible to get it right the first time when you try something new. There is almost always an error or something that just doesn’t look right. You’re going to be forced to re-read the documentation, troubleshoot over and over again and finally find the fix. This is much closer to the real world scenario where you have to learn from failures to get better at anything!
Finding bugs, learning what went wrong, spending hours fixing it and finally watching as all the components fall together on my screen was probably the biggest dopamine rush this camp has given
2. It never ends!
What do you mean? Are we just going in circles forever?
You’ll never really complete your code, your website, your design or whatever you’re working on. That’s the thing about us humans, we’re never really quite done with things, there’s that one little thing that could be changed, one shade of colour that would look better, one line of code that could be written differently.
We have to learn to let things go once they reach a certain level of completion. Take for example my portfolio website, I spent days deciding the colours and layout. But finally, I had to let it go and put it up so I could receive feedback and make improvements later. Yes, it will be a constantly growing site as I add more bells and whistles to it as I improve my knowledge, but getting it out there for the world to see is important, even with all its imperfections.
Too many times we miss opportunities not because we aren’t capable of grabbing them, but rather because we spent too long preparing for them.
As the Nike tagline says, “Just do it!”
3. Consistency matters
Little runs regularly over a long time > Large sprints occasionally
Programming is a vast ocean, and what we learnt in levelZero was a small swimming pool’s worth of knowledge, but the action of swimming, it remains the same. It surely gets harder as you have to go up against the waves and tides of the ocean but the basic act of swimming is the same.
So focus on your basics, practice them regularly, and as you get better, you’ll find it easier to venture into larger areas and face harder challenges. The same applies to code, if you get your fundamentals sorted, it becomes easier to work on larger projects and take up much harder challenges that would have once seemed impossible.
Remember, it is much better to spend 30 minutes a day on a regular basis than it is to spend half a dozen hours on the weekend and not practice for the rest of the week! Our brain loves continuity and consistency!
These are some of the lessons I learnt from my experience with the boot camp. I hope this helps you out in some way!
I look forward to sharing more insights, both technical and non-technical as I progress through this program!
