Week one out of twelve down. 55 (working) days to go until I can be considered worthy of a “web developer” job, or something of that sort. This first week of the Awesome Inc U web developer bootcamp, while not terribly overwhelming, definitely left me fatigued but excited to learn more. Apart from morning warmups (where we spend an hour working through 1-2 JavaScript math problems from Hackerrank), general discussions and starting to work on our portfolio sites in class, we learned and applied the basics of the following languages and technologies in our first five days of the bootcamp:
My main takeaway from this first week is how differently we are learning how to think. To solve development problems, I have to come at them from a very different standpoint than what I am used to. Having my UX Design and Product Owner backgrounds, I have been trained by bosses, the tech industry, conferences lectures and myself to always think of the user when creating new design patterns, setting up stories and milestones for dev execution and giving input at project briefing meetings. Now, during these bare bones times where I am just starting to build my developer toolkit and learn how these new technologies work, I don’t have a target audience I need to cater my work to. Instead, I am forced to just think about how the heck to make this thing work and spit out a certain integer from an array of numbers I am given, for example.
Product, Design and Engineering are so closely linked in technology, as they were the same department at my last company. Each of those three parts form a triangle in my mind that have to work together to deliver the best product possible to an audience. But the way engineering has to think compared to Product and Design, respectively, is extremely different. This new objective way of thinking is just as frustrating as it is interesting, and I look forward to expanding my mind even more towards it and eventually applying all of my experiences together as our projects become more comprehensive.