What’s your favourite biscuit?
A round up of my first week in a Northcoders bootcamp.
What’s your favourite biscuit? That’s how it begins. All the anxiety, the dreams about those pesky missing curly brackets just melt away. The obvious Jaffa cake conundrum aside, within 10 minutes we have all settled into our new life as Northcoders cohorts. (If you want to know, my biscuit of choice was a caramel milk chocolate digestive.)
This first week is designed as an introduction to the course, to help familiarise ourselves with the concepts we will be using everyday. Github, the Command Line. Things I had not even considered before applying for a place on the course. If you are reading this because you are considering joining a Northcoders bootcamp and are thinking “But I just want to write code and build things!” Trust me, you will have a hard time doing that without these tools. GitHub is a fantastic cloud based Git repository used for version control and collaboration on projects. The first time I was faced with the command line I was mildly panicked, but honestly it is not as intimidating as it looks. It takes in commands which it passes on to the operating system to run. It can be used as a more efficient way of manoeuvring in and out of files.
You are introduced to these tools all at once, which could feel overwhelming, but the bootcamp has been designed so that you are made to perform the same commands repeatedly and by the end of the week you are using these commands without having to think.
What happens on a typical day
8:30am A warm up in the morning of either reading materials, katas or a list of a few topics the tutors want us to research before our lectures.
9–10am A morning lecture. This weeks topics covered: Github, the command line, Visual studio code and conditional logic.
After the lecture you get a series of exercises and questions to attempt.
2–3pm We have another lecture, this weeks topics covered: ReGex, Higher Order Functions, exports and require.
When the afternoon lecture has finished we receive more materials to work through!
The volume of exercises and questions you get is quite high for a CodeNewbie like me, but they do stress they do not expect us to finish all of the questions .(Which is a good job because if I could, I probably wouldn’t need to be on a bootcamp!)
5pm Home time!
Thoughts on this week
I was concerned about learning such an intense concept remotely. There are a few different things Northcoders have implemented to try and bring the school room to the virtual room.
Nchelp is a helpdesk which is accessed by the command line (of course, they wouldn’t miss an opportunity for us to practice that skill) Supported by a plethora of fantastic tutors that will hop on a personal zoom call to help clarify concepts. You never feel like they are rushing you, all the while reassuring you of your abilities.
There is also the slack channel for you to chat with your cohorts and to bounce ideas around. Like, why, do we still keep typing in our slack channels “git status”.
There have been highs, and there have been lows this week. It’s hard work, it truly is, but you get back what you put in. YOU are in the driving seat, they’re just holding the map.
