I finished taking a programming boot camp (3 months). Ask me anything.

[fuzzybabybunny]

It was the Web Development Immersive (WDI) from General Assembly.

Ask me anything.

 

[Albatross]

Alright,so are you employable with the acquired skills?What languages have you learned?What would be the difference if you were to do it on your own?Thanks.

 

[Graze]

Alright,so are you employable with the acquired skills?What languages have you learned?What would be the difference if you were to do it on your own?Thanks.

I would love to know this.

 

[mikegg]

What city did you do it in? Were your classmates motivated? Do you feel like you're ready for the workforce? Do you feel like you have a good grasp of programming in general?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Some background for me - I wrote some very simple procedural PHP before the course. I didn't have a solid understanding of HTML, I was very weak with CSS, and I didn't know JS or jQuery at all.

Alright,so are you employable with the acquired skills?What languages have you learned?What would be the difference if you were to do it on your own?Thanks.

We focused on Rails and JS. Of course there was CSS and HTML. I'm most definitely employable as a junior-level developer straight out the course, and additional mentorship is needed before I can figure out most issues on my own.

We ended up using Ruby, Rails, AngularJS, MeteorJS, jQuery, JS, Bootstrap, SemanticUI, Foundation, HandlebarsJS, PostGreSQL, MongoDB, 3rd party APIs, and created our own APIs (in Rails) to allow for Ajax calls.

Heh, for one of my projects I tried to create a single page app in RAILS. Wow, was that a learning experience.

I can't imagine being ANYWHERE close to where I am now without the course. Before this course I felt that the world of coding was a mess. I didn't know where to begin. And I didn't have the individual willpower nor the desire to do it on my own. Having a line of code not work and having to wait for someone on some forum to answer your question can be very frustrating. It's much better to just have an instructor around to ask questions. And you learn much better and much faster that way anyway.

The course gave us a very solid foundation so that way can continue to learn on our own.

What city did you do it in? Were your classmates motivated? Do you feel like you're ready for the workforce? Do you feel like you have a good grasp of programming in general?

I did it in Hong Kong. Motivation was split. The ones that were really motivated became very good coders with many job prospects. The ones that weren't motivated and didn't do outside study or "fucking around with code" on their own time didn't get very far.

I'm ready for the workforce as a junior programmer and I can see myself in a year as being pretty solid. I have my own business, so I'm not actually looking for a job, but this new skillset is going to be incredibly beneficial for me as a business owner.

I know what to look for in a new hire. There are parts of my website that I can implement myself. I can build a CMS system from the ground up if needed (right now, slowly). Most importantly, I know how to learn more and how to get better. When I was just starting out I felt that the learning curve was just too steep and lacking any kind of order.

I have a mediocre grasp of programming (IMO), but I know that I'll get better. Before this course, I *didn't* know if I could ever get any better.

The course was 8-9 hours a day, every weekday. Times after the course and weekends were spent working on coding.

The defining factor of this course was working on many different projects / websites. We made 4-5 different websites during the course which helped us figure out the workings of HTML, CSS, databases, etc. Other courses have a very lecture-oriented structure and I don't feel that this would be a good way to teach. Coding is a vocational skill and the best learning is done out in the field on projects.

 

[Stable]

What were the admission requirements? My brother has applied to one of the better known ones "App Academy" and the requirements to get in are no walk in the park. They accept something similar to stanford (9%), the whole course is free, and they claim 95% placement rate. There are caveats like having a 4 year degree (or at least have been accepted to a 4 year school i think) and the whole testing process to get in. I honestly don't think he'll get in, and he went to Berk.

 

[uclabachelor]

Given a tree data structure (think CATEGORIES on any ecommerce site) and a relational database, how would you store the data in a database so that any node can be retrieved along with its children, including the root node?

 

[Graze]

Given a tree data structure (think CATEGORIES on any ecommerce site) and a relational database, how would you store the data in a database so that any node can be retrieved along with its children, including the root node?

Is this a trick question? Sounds like a standard(one to many) relation would work. I am no database expert.

 

[Cerb]

Given a tree data structure (think CATEGORIES on any ecommerce site) and a relational database, how would you store the data in a database so that any node can be retrieved along with its children, including the root node?

Usually in a way you wouldn't want to, because by the time you need that, the schema has been made to fulfill a different purpose entirely, and you have to come up with some fugly sproc or view to do it, so as not to go screwing around with an otherwise working schema . In Postgres, though, a standard tree would work, since it has recursive queries, and they aren't too slow.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

What were the admission requirements? My brother has applied to one of the better known ones "App Academy" and the requirements to get in are no walk in the park. They accept something similar to stanford (9%), the whole course is free, and they claim 95% placement rate. There are caveats like having a 4 year degree (or at least have been accepted to a 4 year school i think) and the whole testing process to get in. I honestly don't think he'll get in, and he went to Berk.

The admission requirements for Hong Kong were pretty lax. It was more of a personality interview than anything else. Their main focus though (at least for me) was that I have a personality type where I will continue learning on my own, after the course is over.

The end of the course is only the beginning of the journey. It's the initial push to get over the learning curve and to have enough of an introduction to the wide breadth of knowledge that is web coding to go off on your own and be dangerous with more practice.

I'm still figuring out a lot of stuff, but I have enough foundation that I'm now confident that I *can* figure everything out, eventually.

 

[mikegg]

What were the admission requirements? My brother has applied to one of the better known ones "App Academy" and the requirements to get in are no walk in the park. They accept something similar to stanford (9%), the whole course is free, and they claim 95% placement rate. There are caveats like having a 4 year degree (or at least have been accepted to a 4 year school i think) and the whole testing process to get in. I honestly don't think he'll get in, and he went to Berk.

Many of them require that you have previous programming experience or studied a lot prior to applying. If it's "free", they aren't just going to take any body. They want to take people who have a high chance of succeeding and finding jobs so they can make money from the employers.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Many of them require that you have previous programming experience or studied a lot prior to applying. If it's "free", they aren't just going to take any body. They want to take people who have a high chance of succeeding and finding jobs so they can make money from the employers.

Yeah, totally different program type from mine. I paid for mine upfront. The other schools that are free but take a percentage of your earnings after the course would predictably have some very high entry requirements.

My course had a pretty wide range of students. There were a few that didn't get much out of the course, but also a few that got a LOT out of the course. At the end of the day it comes down to the student, the learning environment, and how willing the instructors are to be mentors outside the class.

 

[Albatross]

Do you feel that PHP is looked down upon since the spread of Python and Ruby?Will you continue to learn it?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Do you feel that PHP is looked down upon since the spread of Python and Ruby?Will you continue to learn it?

Absolutely. PHP is extremely looked down upon. We didn't learn any.

I personally may learn some if I ever end up needed to do work for a client that already has a PHP site going and can't realistically do a complete overhaul. After the course people got approached by quite a few hiring companies looking for PHP developers.

 

[mrjminer]

Are you able to use the languages effectively without the assistance of a framework?

Also, was mobile development / responsive CSS included, and, if so, was the principle practiced to design for mobile first?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Are you able to use the languages effectively without the assistance of a framework?

Also, was mobile development / responsive CSS included, and, if so, was the principle practiced to design for mobile first?

I think I can do things without a framework, but I don't want to. I like the idea of having a framework so there are at least some standards and conventions being followed by other coders. I can't wait until Meteor gets a framework.

CSS was not emphasized in the course and I didn't figure out the Bootstrap grid system and @media until much later. we definitely have talks from guest speakers though that hammered in the mobile first philosophy, but its up to us to figure out how to implement it.

 

[mrjminer]

I think I can do things without a framework, but I don't want to. I like the idea of having a framework so there are at least some standards and conventions being followed by other coders. I can't wait until Meteor gets a framework.

CSS was not emphasized in the course and I didn't figure out the Bootstrap grid system and @media until much later. we definitely have talks from guest speakers though that hammered in the mobile first philosophy, but its up to us to figure out how to implement it.

Thanks

 

[Blueychan]

I think I can do things without a framework, but I don't want to. I like the idea of having a framework so there are at least some standards and conventions being followed by other coders. I can't wait until Meteor gets a framework.

CSS was not emphasized in the course and I didn't figure out the Bootstrap grid system and @media until much later. we definitely have talks from guest speakers though that hammered in the mobile first philosophy, but its up to us to figure out how to implement it.

fuzzy, what do you mean by "I can't wait until meteor gets a framework"? From what I read, Meteor is a framework built ontop of Node in the same way that Rails is to Ruby.

This is one thing I hate about web development, too many different frameworks.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

fuzzy, what do you mean by "I can't wait until meteor gets a framework"? From what I read, Meteor is a framework built ontop of Node in the same way that Rails is to Ruby.

This is one thing I hate about web development, too many different frameworks.

It is, but it's not opinionated like Rails and doesn't enforce many standards or conventions. You can do some serious spaghetti code in Meteor and if you're building an app or taking over an existing Meteor app from another developer, things could get confusing.

 

[purbeast0]

you can do serious spaghetti code in any language though if it's poorly written. and taking over any app from a previous developer is going to have a significant startup cost and learning curve. that is just the nature of the beast.

one of the benefits of JSON and a lot of the web stuff is that is ISN'T structured, which is also the beauty of mongo because you can save things in the same exact way you retrieve them.

but, that does mean you have to be extra careful for sure. but that is where a bunch of tests can really come in handy.

as far as frameworks/libraries go, i've been using angular at my current position for about 9 months now and now that i have the hang of it i really like it.

 

[Spydermag68]

what is MVC?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

what is MVC?

Model-View-Controller. Rails uses it. We do our best to create fat models and thin controllers. Meteor doesn't enforce an MVC architecture but I'm doing my best to do it on my own accord.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

you can do serious spaghetti code in any language though if it's poorly written. and taking over any app from a previous developer is going to have a significant startup cost and learning curve. that is just the nature of the beast.

one of the benefits of JSON and a lot of the web stuff is that is ISN'T structured, which is also the beauty of mongo because you can save things in the same exact way you retrieve them.

but, that does mean you have to be extra careful for sure. but that is where a bunch of tests can really come in handy.

as far as frameworks/libraries go, i've been using angular at my current position for about 9 months now and now that i have the hang of it i really like it.

Yeah, agreed. Different frameworks have different opportunities for spaghetti code though.

Meteor - you can code your entire website (BOTH client and server code)in just one file. This is scary.

Rails - impossible to do the above.

Oh yeah:

Tests - we briefly covered tests but it's hard to pack everything into a 3-month course. For my class, tests were introduced, we were told it's a best practice, but we didn't implement them at all (tests in general take some serious discipline to enforce). Other classes may be different and have more discipline in this regard. We did some very simple testing in Rails (which I forgot how to do), were told that other frameworks have testing as well, and that there's even a feature of Github or the testing framework that won't allow you to push your code unless all tests have passed.

Github - we used Git and Github extensively as well as in teams to do pull requests on team projects.

I briefly looked into Angular and I can definitely see its benefits when you are required to use a standard backend framework like Rails.

I have the luxury of not having work that requires a certain language, so I don't really find much need for Angular since I'm using Meteor (so far) since I've got reactivity everywhere anyway.

 

[Markbnj]

For my class, tests were introduced, we were told it's a best practice, but we didn't implement them at all (tests in general take some serious discipline to enforce).

Don't worry, it's exactly like that at most working dev shops too.

 

[Cerb]

Model-View-Controller. Rails uses it. We do our best to create fat models and thin controllers. Meteor doesn't enforce an MVC architecture but I'm doing my best to do it on my own accord.

Aside from making sure the client doesn't get any sensitive code, like authentication or authorization, don't worry overly much. With reactive, especially event-driven, web software, the controller really exists in all three layers you define, anyway, since two-way communication often breaks, the client isn't the dumb terminal it used to be, and view updating is almost wrapped into a controller, rather than a model, for reasons of correctness, SOA design, or just sanity (the model keeping itself safe could be enough work, without making it generate activity elsewhere). A lot of what makes MVC tick is unnecessary, or unusable, much of the time. It seems a better way to organize library code than application code, to me, compared to an event-driven system that doesn't worry itself with such details (which also tends to make for less code, and fewer files to have it scattered about in, but a bit more boiler plate to build).