Half time in the Web Developer Bootcamp

Hi, I'm Alexa, 26 years old and I'm taking part in the Web Development Bootcamp at neue fische - School and Pool for Digital Talent. Over the next few weeks, I'll tell you about my experiences during the course and provide you with information about our web developer training at neue fische - School and Pool for Digital Talent.

The time has come: we have officially completed half of our bootcamp! Besides the relief and a little bit of pride that we all made it this far, there is also a little bit of uncertainty. We have all learned an incredible amount in the last 6 weeks. But so far we still feel very far away from a real developer job. But I hope that this feeling will disappear at the latest with our digital masterpiece, when each of us has a real, finished project to show. .

What is good UX design?

This question was the focus of this week. On Monday, we got a crash course in Sketch, a design software that specializes specifically in digital interface design. Since I had already dealt with the topic of UX design in a previous job, this week was a major win for me. But also everyone who hadn't dealt with the topic before had a lot of fun this week.

Designing your own app

Once we had mastered the basics of Sketch, we were given the task of designing our own app. This app was to relate to our everyday life at bootcamp. We came up with apps that dealt with personal scrum boards and to-do lists, or apps that were meant to simplify the organization of our 1on1s with Jerry. Everyone was free to express themselves, taking into account the basics of UX design, so that in the end a number of very individual and different designs came out.

The Challenge

After we had finished designing our apps and the associated acceptance criteria, Jerry had a little surprise for us: each of us had to choose the app of another participant and rebuild it according to the available designs. This was exciting, because later on, in real companies, we will most likely have to rebuild applications according to the specifications of others. Of course, just like in real companies, we also had the opportunity to talk to the "designer" of the app, which also gave us the opportunity to practice the appropriate communication in the team.

On the other hand, this exercise also gave us a chance to learn to assess our own coding skills. What can we accomplish in a week? What did we perhaps overdo in the design? Especially with regard to our digital journeyman's piece, which we want to start in about three weeks, this was an instructive experience. After all, we're supposed to plan and execute the entire journeyman's piece ourselves. And even though Jerry will help us to choose the right scope for our projects, it certainly won't hurt if we learn to estimate the effort of our projects already now.

The Capstone Project

Since we'll be spending the third month of our three-month advanced training as web developers almost exclusively on our own journeyman piece, we don't have much time left to learn anything new. However, we still have one big topic ahead of us: React. Since React will probably play a central role in our capstone projects for most of us, the next two to three weeks could be exhausting once again.