The Web Developer Bootcamp

Hi Devs,

How are you guys doing? I am fascinated by the stories of people who become developers. Some are not undergraduates in Computer Science, they were completely in some other profession. Some were teachers, salesmen, plumber and they made their way through computers.

From all my research and the case studies, I have observed there are three ways by which a person becomes a developer or gets a job into the glamorous world of tech giants and start-ups.

1. Undergraduate degree in Computer Science - This is the conventional method of learning where a person devotes three to four years in college, studies various disciplines of the computers. They also make some projects to get industry exposure and get into the software companies by on-campus and off-campus placements.

2. The boot camps - The conventional method is very expensive in terms of fees and time. We will learn all the subjects of computers which we will never apply to our companies. In tech-companies, you will be expected to be good at some subject and tools allowing them to work in web development, data science, database administrator, software development, data security as per the company's requirement. These are all part of the process required in delivering a software product.

Boot camps understand the structure and prepare you to be a specialist in any of the above-mentioned roles. They structure the course in such a way that this gets completed within six months to a one-year duration which is less compared to undergraduate programs. Though boot camps generally charge high, the value is less compared to UG programs.

1. The self-learned developers - With time the data consumption rates have reduced drastically and the internet is accessible by a whole lot of people. The rise in data consumption has led to many online businesses due to its ease of use and scalable capabilities encouraging more people to use the internet. This has led to a rise in content creators and information losing its value because anyone can search the internet and find his solution.

Some people don't want to spend a lot of money on boot camps or they can't afford bootcamps but are full of dedication to the type of life that this job can provide. They search contents over the internet in the form of tech-blogs, tutorials, and video tutorials on the internet. For structured learning, they go with MOOCs like Udemy, Edx, and Coursera. For textual-learning, they go with documentation. study with self-imposed discipline with a compelling goal in mind.

I am a UG in Computers. I was working on various technologies but did not give importance to understand how the market works and how these technologies help companies to flourish. I worked on increasing my understanding of businesses. This made me realize how we get paid as employees and how by knowing one skill which is hot in-market leads to the rise of my value that I get as money.

I surfed the internet and with tons of searching, I found that for someone who wants to learn programming Python and JavaScript are the language. Also, there is less number of frontend engineers. So, I took up React as the frontend framework and JavaScript as my first language, although I had some basic knowledge of C++. Now, I realize gaining knowledge without implementing is zero-knowledge.

In the beginning, I was having discipline issues, procrastination issues, and anxiety issues but I held on and I am doing well as of now. I have had some knowledge from the tutorials, solving freecodecamp challenges. It is very difficult for me to study in an unstructured way, so I have taken the Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele looking at the recommendation from various sources. I am liking this course and have covered up to the intermediate CSS sections.