Lukas' experience report #1

My start in Cologne. Working in workflows and programs is the given standard at neue fische from day one.

For neue fische I moved from Stuttgart to Cologne for 3 months

Wow, the first 3 weeks of our bootcamp are already over and they flew by. I first stumbled across neue fische on the On the Way to New Work podcast at the end of last year. Cool concept, I thought, but had freshly founded a company at the time and was mentally far away from the three months "time out"...until I landed on neuefische.de again at the end of April, after the presentation of the XING New Work Award 2019. After a totally sympathetic phone call with Gesche, who had already participated in the bootcamp herself and now works at neue fische, I had no choice but to apply. My idea of what I wanted to learn and be able to do matched the course content perfectly. And luckily it worked out, both with the bootcamp and with the financing through CHANCEN eG. In mid-August, I finally started in Cologne, where I moved from Stuttgart for three months.

Web developers work in programs and workflows - that's standard at neue fische from day one.

In Cologne I met ten other really great participants. All of them have a different background and very different previous experiences. Everyone is motivated to learn and to absorb the topics, most of which are completely new to us. That's what I was looking forward to the most, because that's a real motivator for me. It is remarkable that the maximum number of participants was not exhausted for the course in order to maintain the quality of the group. 

The basics of any website: learning HTML and CSS 

By the end of the first week focusing on HTML, we had already built and published our first smaller responsive website using Bootstrap. From day one at the new fish bootcamp, we learned to work in programs and workflows that would later become standard for us as developers. Hard for me to believe, but instead of using a normal text program, I'm writing this blog post right now using Markdown in VS Code as a matter of course. Three weeks ago, I knew neither. 

In the second week, the "CSS week", the content from the first week has already pretty much solidified. We also completed our first group project. We designed a mobile app from scratch and implemented it together. That was really fun, also because we realized how useful tools like Git or Github are while working together. We were warned in advance that we would be doing things more often during the course that we didn't understand at first, but that would explain themselves later. Today I can say: this is true, even for the tools mentioned above and the related workflows :-)

JavaScript is the central topic of the coming weeks

Last week we got to know JavaScript, which will probably accompany us most intensively in the coming weeks. With it, we were able to interactively experience our group projects from the week before for the first time. JavaScript takes everything to a new level. I can't wait to see what we can do with it in the coming weeks.

My first conclusion

My head has been full every night so far. It's so much input. At the same time, it's super fun to learn so much new stuff in such a short amount of time. With two hours away from the day, a bit of Rhine air and one or two Kölsch, you start to feel like working on your projects again.
These are my first impressions of the Web Development Bootcamp in Cologne. The bootcamp offers me everything I want to learn and be able to do.

See you soon, Lukas ✌️