Daniel Shapiro

hey y'all! i dropped this wall of text in reply to the poll, but realized it was answering a different question -- do boot camps prepare you for the market? so i'm dropping my thoughts here in case anyone is using this space to decide whether the boot camp experience is right for them 🙂

the boot camp experience did let me enter the market with a solid project and web dev fundamentals. however, i will say that most of material discussions i had with interviewers in my successful application were extended knowledge i had to pick up afterwards. particularly: evented/distributed architecture, cloud basics, scripting, authorization and authentication, and some common tools/libraries/frameworks beyond those covered at the boot camp. i also had additional projects written after the boot camp thanks to this community 🙂, and those were super important!

the practical knowledge - agile development, ci/cd, git, a solid GitHub history (many repos, commits, projects, PRs and issues etc) and the experience of working on 2 project teams with specific roles and ownership over different facets of each project - this is something i wouldn't have been able to speak to or have a track record of proven ability.

so i'm highly in favor of the boot camp experience, and while i do think you could cobble the knowledge together outside it, you really can't replicate the team experiences like standup, negotiating differences of opinion and disagreements, giving time to others and swapping the driver role to navigate someone else through a tricky problem by pair programming, and the practical experience of making tradeoffs like deciding to roll your own vs use a library a teammate recommends, or pivot during POC/MVP, or review and understand others' code and learn to work within the restrictions it places on the project.

i built an app before the boot camp that i used in all my applications, and i enjoyed speaking to the difference in having total control of every decision vs working with other devs. highly suggest that anyone who wants to boot camp it up build something complete and deploy it beforehand: you'll get so much more out of the boot camp if you have already struggled and succeeded in launching something, since you'll have a more robust mental model of the domain.

you'll be better able to connect the disparate concepts that you race through, and you'll know how to estimate your time and the complexity of the tasks at hand when the projects start! ultimately, you'll be an asset to your team and will probably naturally assume a leadership position within it. all of this gives you confidence and allows you to engage with your interviewers as a software developer, rather than a dev-in-training or someone looking to break into the field, and you'll have the knowledge/experience to back it up 🙂

i will say also that boot camps are great for breadth and terrible for depth, so expect to do at least a few additional hours a day on top of the core material and you'll be amazed at your progress!