Bootcamp Journal

I just finished the first quarter of my six month coding bootcamp. It started easy but halfway into week two my classmates and I realized we were in a marathon. The assignments became harder and longer, and by the end of week three we were swamped. That weekend I spent every waking hour (save the two I spent watching The Imitation Game) on rescue practice and coding. And I didn’t even get caught up on my assignments. When I realized I wasn’t going to get caught up I had a moment of personal catharsis—I cut myself some slack. My thinking was, if I can spend the majority of my free time working then I’m doing my very best, whether I’m caught up or not. I also talked to a few of my classmates and learned that they were all behind as well. The next day our instructors finally revealed that finishing all the assignments wasn’t actually required. The main thing, they said, was to understand the concepts and do a great job on the end-of-quarter projects and the assessments.

By that time, I’d spent three weeks studying my ass off. I was waking up working through imaginary coding problems in my head. I was constantly oscillating between feeling lost and feeling victorious. When I started on my personal project I had a ton of momentum. I got started early, ignored all other assignments, and flew through the project. By Tuesday of project week I had finished an MVP (minimum viable product), and it looked great! But I kept working on it right up until presentation day (Friday), banging my head against challenges that were utterly superfluous, but added more pretty to my project.

Even though I was coasting on the project, I was still toasted by Friday. My project was awesome, but I think my presentation suffered a bit. Next time I plan to keep my energy up more, which ought to be doable since the next two projects are group projects. As a group of four, we’ll be able to share the load and put our heads together to solve problems. And I’m already thinking hard about my capstone project—the cumulative project at the end of the program. In fact I have an idea that I’m pretty excited about, so I’m already researching APIs that might allow me to do what I’m thinking about doing. I won’t describe it here, but suffice to say it seems like a reach challenge—at least right now it does.

The total effect of all this is, I have a lot of energy these days. And I feel smarter. I’m pretty sure that spending as much time as I am coding is having a great effect on my brain. Also the cardio probably isn’t hurting—I’m doing insanity again. Friday I probably celebrated a bit too much, because Saturday I was toast. I guess it was the fatigue too. So the combination of drinking and burning both ends of the candle took it’s toll. But that was a brief setback. I feel like if I continue to build a routine based on coding and cardio and writing—heyo!—I’m going to see some really interesting developments in myself over the next few months. My abilities and activities are finally rising to meet my ambition. Bwa ha ha! Life is good.