The First Week of Coding Bootcamp: What I Learned & How to Survive It

Currently enrolled in our Online Program, Harmony Trevena is learning to code full time so that she can take her career in a new direction. She discusses what the first week of our bootcamp is like, from meeting your classmates to the value of completing the assigned pre-work. She also shares her top tip for handling the fast pace of a bootcamp.

Coding Bootcamp Week 1

• Much of the first week in your coding bootcamp will be focused on getting you settled in and ready to excel in the upcoming weeks.

• On Day 1, you'll get to know your instructor and classmates, and the DigitalCrafts team will go through a presentation sharing what you can expect throughout the rest of your cohort, along with some rules of etiquette and what you'll need to complete in order to graduate.

• You'll set up your dev environment, the collection of tools needed for developing, testing and debugging an application.

• In your first week at DigitalCrafts, you will learn programming fundamentals and how to manage your project code by using a variety of tools, such as the command line and Git. You will also set up your own GitHub profile. In the full-time Immersive program, you will also learn Python fundamentals: dictionaries objects, creating classes and making lists.

• The biggest highlight? The feeling of accomplishment you get when you're able to build upon what you learned the previous day.

Tips for Success in Your Coding Bootcamp

• Do the assigned pre-work! We'll send you an email after you enroll with all the details on the prep work we suggest you complete before your class starts. This will help you get familiar with terminology and you'll have your laptop set up with everything you need to get started.

• The biggest challenge is keeping up with the fast pace, so use your free time to practice what you've learned in class.

If you'd like to read along, here's the full transcript of Harmony's video:

Welcome to the next 16 weeks of my life! So I just started my journey to becoming a software developer. I am currently taking the online and immersive full-stack bootcamp with DigitalCrafts, and I just wanted to kind of summarize week one as I'm getting started. And this is a very new topic to me to, you know, help inspire or answer questions of anyone else out there that might be thinking about a similar career change.

So week one, most of what we did on the first day was get to know each other. It's great. It's a small class. It's very hands on. So, you know, getting to know the instructor and our teacher's assistants, as well as all of the other students, which will be, I'm sure a big part of my life for the next 16 weeks as we go through this together, we also go to our development environment set up.

If you're not familiar with doing that, and you did want to get a bit of a headstart, DigitalCrafts provides some really great pre-work so that you can go through and have pretty much your whole machine set up before the first day of class, which is what I chose to do. I am using Mac.

There are some tools that come standard, and it was nice to get a feel for my computer before the first day of class. So I would recommend that. Probably the biggest success thus far is being actually building upon what we learned the day before and being able to continually follow what the instructor was going over.

We've spent this past week in Python and mainly doing dictionaries objects, creating classes, going through and making lists. So just really the fundamentals of getting the hang of Python and week two, for us, I think—a little sneak peek—is going to be project week, which will be really exciting.

Probably the biggest challenge thus far has been the pace. It is definitely very fast paced. We do stop and we go back over things. But if you aren't practicing what we've done, you know, between the class hours in the evenings, it's definitely easy to feel behind whether or not you're actually behind is, you know, personal circumstance really.

And then, you know, after that, it's just been very exciting. So I will keep you guys posted. You can go to my GitHub and follow my projects as I post them, but this'll be, you know, week one of 16!

Ready to take the next step in your career and become a developer? Download our course packet for more information about our full-stack web development bootcamps.

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