My bootcamp journey

Motivation

Back in 2018 when I was in London, I experienced firsthand how technology helped UK to become a world-leader in tech-driven innovation, there were countless stories about someone who’s programming skills were more than enough to change the status quo and make a difference in society, most importantly they had the “power” to turn an idea into reality, that’s when I started my journey, a journey I embarked on with many doubts, fear of failure, but I somehow knew, I already found my path.

When I landed Perú, my eagerness to follow a new and exciting career path to become a “Full Stack Developer” led me to Codigo a programming bootcamp powered by Tecsup, a leading education provider aiming to offer training in skills the industry needs, and programming was certainly one of them. I found myself surrounded of a new professional jargon, like “commit your changes”, “where is your repo?”, “clean code”.

Moment of truth

With a solid base in maths, logical thinking, plus some knowledge of C++, and algorithms, I thought I was ready to take the first step, though shortly I hit a wall, one were time was the only constraint, due to the many frameworks, programming paradigms, design skills and agile frameworks such as Scrum, that I was challenged to master in 4 months.

I remembered my time as an undergrad at the National University of Engineering in Lima-Perú, where I was in a similar situation, I was supposed to learn as quickly as possible and put it all into practice at the end of the bootcamp.

Finding my passion

If you are reading this then you’ll be asking yourself, so then What did you do?, Did you gave up?, Did you realized it wasn’t your thing?.

And you may be right, but there is a key difference here, sometimes we forgot we have some creativity that we hold back and forgot about, especially in this day and era, when we are caught by circumstances, and are forced to develop other skills.

And you may be right, but there is a key difference here, sometimes we forgot we have some creativity that we hold back and forgot about, especially in this day and era, when we are caught by circumstances, and are forced to develop other skills.

I thought I was gonna be alone in those moments where you’re in doubt and don’t have any clue about how things works, but don’t worry there is always someone, somewhere else with a similar question posted in Stack Overflow. You’ll be surprised by the quality of the responses, some of them are quite elaborated, in short, there is a community out there of people struggling like you, and some others with more experience willing to help you out.

Is English a must?

It certainly is, although my mother tongue is Spanish, English has helped me to find some high quality resources, just an example “official documentation” is generally written in English, if you are able to read it, then you’re half-way done.

Reading the console is a superpower that will give you a hand whenever you encounter a bug to fix.

You’ll be amazed by the amount of books, blogs and even webinars, with just the right answer to your problems, or at least an idea, and to me this is of paramount importance, so please invest some time to learn English, you don’t need to be a PRO, English is one of those tools that will help you overcome difficulties along the way.

Piece of advice: keep learning

As for me, I felt I learnt quite a lot in the bootcamp, but that doesn’t mean the journey has finished, I just saw the tip of the iceberg, I know some popular frameworks like ReactJS, VueJS, AngularJs and some backend programming languages like Javascript or Python, but to be honest practice leads to mastery, and right now, while you’re reading this I’m certainly coding and keep improving all what I’ve learnt.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please share, and spread the word, it is not impossible to become a Full Stack developer.

If you wanna take a look at my repo, you could find it here: My GitHub repo, if you're hiring a junior front-end developer or have questions regarding my experience at the bootcamp, you can email me at hacodeml@gmail.com.