Our final project is done!
After the bootcamp is before the job

I am Christoph, 33 years old and come from Hamburg. I would like to finally realize my wish to work as a developer by participating in the neue fische bootcamp! During my three-month course I will take you with me on my journey and will report regularly about my experiences as a budding programmer.

After a few exhausting weeks, I am now getting back to you. I still haven't quite realized it, but we have all now successfully completed and finished the bootcamp. That is an achievement we can all be proud of.

For me, the last few weeks of the course were another huge learning curve because we independently developed an app as part of our final project. I was therefore able to consolidate and expand on a lot of content from the previous weeks. 

The most important thing for me was uring the development of our own app, learning and understanding were also in the foreground. For me, it was secondary to include as many different features as possible. I preferred to develop few, but complex and challenging functionalities. I think this focus helped me a lot, as I was able to take away a lot of "aha-experiences" and to better understand basic principles in JavaScript and React.js.

Since I was able to learn a lot of new things in the meantime, I also had the feeling of having been productive on a daily basis. In my opinion, this is much better than measuring your own success solely on the basis of whether a story was pushed to "Done" on the Scrum board. Especially as a beginner, frustration can otherwise quickly arise because planned features can rarely be implemented directly without problems.

Developers are problem solvers 

For me, one of the tasks of a good developer is to address challenging, difficult implementations of code. And to analyze emerging problems until a good solution is found. Because the chances are high that this is exactly where the greatest added value for the user is created.

My own experience is that it is difficult to predict how long it will take to find a solution. Sometimes I wanted to add a feature to the app, got an error message and was able to solve it within 5 minutes. But often it just takes a whole day, during which I could learn a lot about the bug, but just didn't necessarily have the solution (or not a good solution) yet. A certain "frustration tolerance" is therefore absolutely necessary. Anyway, I feel a strong mindset is a very important quality to be able to become a good developer.

The neue fische bootcamp was a success

In retrospect, I can already say that the bootcamp was a complete success for my learning progress. I have developed a lot in the last three months and got an overwhelming amount of high quality input. The latter was especially important to me.

Of course, I don't want to develop just any solution that works, but to be able to write high-quality, scalable, and easy-to-read code in the future. As a beginner, that certainly doesn't always work, but I wanted to understand the basic principles from the beginning - and then work towards implementing it better and better. So it helped me a lot that our course instructor Jerry paid a lot of attention to "code quality" and internalized the principles of "clean code" and DRY ("don't repeat yourself") with us over and over again.

I am still working through all the content every day to understand it even better. I think, without this self-initiative the success of a bootcamp is significantly reduced, therefore a long-term high (intrinsic) motivation is probably the be-all and end-all for one's own learning success. 

And the bootcamp is only the beginning. During the bootcamp, we already had the opportunity to get to know different companies, so we were able to see which company would be a good fit for our job start as a developer. An important step!

Job entry as a leap to becoming a developer

Because from my point of view, the biggest leap towards becoming a developer comes from getting on the job. There, in the daily team exchange with other developers and confronted with the many real challenges, an enormous growth can take place. So I'm really looking forward to the upcoming time, even though it will certainly be very exhausting and intense.

For me, there has been some nice news right at the beginning of the new year: 
As of February 1, I will start working for deepblue networks, one of neue fische's partner companies. 

In addition to suitable general conditions and exciting projects, I had above all a totally positive gut feeling about deepblue. I found the team very likeable and authentic right from the first introduction at the bootcamp. Through a personal and transparent application process, my good impression was further confirmed.
I'm still using the time to prepare myself as best as possible for the job entry and then just let myself be thrown in at the deep end! I think that's the best way to learn.
In my next article, I'm sure I'll be able to tell you about my first experiences as a developer. I'm looking forward to it - until then!