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I'm not going to talk about what I've learned in DBC or my incredible experiences there. Instead, I'm going to talk about life after DBC because, really, transitioning out of DBC in to the real world (yes, you are not in the real world while at DBC) is actually a lot more difficult than transitioning in to DBC. Below is a list of practices that I believe have helped me extensively after the program.

TAKE A BREAK!

Sleep in all day. Watch a movie. Go to the park. Walk your cat. Sleep in again. Without a doubt, Dev Bootcamp is exhausting. If you've ever heard about the hours of investment bankers - think that. Only difference is, we enjoy what we do (peace, Ashwin!). Nevertheless, no matter how much you enjoy and love what you do, you will get burnt out. 

So take it easy on yourself, you'll be coding again in a few days.

Get an Accountability Buddy

Honestly, I was surprised to how effective this really was. Get someone you trust to be honest with you. Set goals for each day or week and tell your buddy about them. Check on each other to see if you've attained those goals. Appreciate each others work. 

There were some days where I just felt lazy, but since I knew that I had to show that I've actually been working towards my goals, I was motivated to do so. And even more so, knowing that on the other end, my buddy was working equally as hard or harder. If you know that there is someone out there looking out for you and expecting stuff from you, you just tend to work harder.

Go to Hackathons/Meet-ups/Conferences/Anything

Meet people. Share your story. Listen to theirs. Build crazy and outrageous things with them. I'm an introvert, so you have no excuse. 

Here are the facts: 

Only about 15-20% of job openings are listed on ads

Only about 5% actually get jobs from applying to those ads

62% of all statistics are made up. Just kidding.

That's about less than 1% of total jobs being secured online. Sure, it never hurt anyone to actually apply online; I highly recommend it. Just don't expect to be one of the lucky 5% that do get jobs. Instead, look for events that interest you, go to them, and build friendships. Don't explicitly ask to be recommended, but do let it be known that you are looking for opportunities. Even if you don't get a job this way, I'll bet that you'll come away from it a better person with a lot more knowledge and friends to boot. 

Build Something on Your Own

Dev Bootcamp is all about pairing - and that's great. But chances are you won't be pairing when you get a job. There will be no one to cover your weaker areas and no one to give you instant feedback. 

Working on your own will show that you are not dependent on others for your own success and also shows that you are self-motivated. It's also a good way to learn new languages and/or frameworks. Hey, you might just build the next $19 billion app by accident.

Build Something With Others

Just because you're out of DBC doesn't mean that you have to severe ties. Get together with other people and build something - anything. Learn from each other. Teach them all the new cool stuff that you've learned on your own. 

If you didn't like working on teams in DBC then it's time to get on it. I haven't heard of any company where you don't work on a team. 

Have Fun

I just read my last few posts and cringed at my structure and grammatical errors. Oh well... As long as it's still readable.

Sherif, one of the past teachers at DBC San Francisco (and soon to be DBC NYC teacher - you lucky bastards) came in today and gave a talk on MVCs and a speech on the purpose of DBC. With the 45 minute lecture that he gave, I can honestly say that he is one of the best teachers I have ever had. His way of explaining things in a simple and no-bullshit manner while making sure to highlight the important parts just made MVCs so much easier and interesting to boot.

He also touched on what DBC was trying to accomplish. Most of us who have applied to DBC expect to get something in return for the amount that we paid. We expect to go through the program, learn just enough coding tricks to impress employers, and that's that. The thing is, why would interviewers hire us over other people who went to Ivy Leagues or have undergraduate or graduate degrees in computer science? What could we possibly have over them? It basically just boils down to one thing - learning, or more aptly put, learning to learn. 

Coding is a craft. 

The first time we see a painting, we have no opinion of it; it is simply just a painting, whether it is the Mona Lisa or some school project of a preschooler. However, once we have seen thousands of paintings, we start to form opinions. Only then can we distinguish the style or appreciate the skill of the painters. Similarly in coding, when just beginning, all we really see is syntax and how it translates. But as we continue to code, we start to see that it's not just about what the best programming language is or about the latest framework we should be using - it's about understanding how code is structured (I'm not sure if that's the best way to put it, but you get the picture). 

Key takeaway of the day: Learn how to test code without getting attached to it. 

I was expecting week 2 to be an even harder week 1, but today was a really laid back day. My pair and I were able to finish all the challenges plus a stretch challenge before 6pm, which was awesome!

In our morning meeting Shereef (yeah, the big boss) showed us how to do solve hard Sudoku boards in 10 minutes. I was utterly awestruck. We were able to solve easy boards after a whole day of coding and here he is happily typing away and suddenly, boom... Solved!

Of course, this was because he had years of experience. He gave the analogy of a chess master vs a regular chess player. Regular players tend to look at the whole board and try to analyze every piece on the board. Chess masters just look at specific areas in the chess board. They are such experts that they know that other parts of the board don't require much attention and can focus on the important spaces and pieces. In programming, experienced programmers can easily identify pieces and strategies of code that are appropriate to certain situations, while newbies like myself just don't get it yet.

He also had a couple of insights that were incredibly interesting. He was using methods before even writing the code for. It made sense seeing him do this in action. Why code a method before you even know what it does? You can't even be sure that you would have a use for it. By implementing a method in your code, you know exactly what you want it to do. 

The weekend was actually pretty chill. It's such a relief not having to rush in the morning. We did go to DBC late in the afternoon and stayed for until 11pm, but even then I didn't feel as stressed out as I was during the week. That also meant that I got little done. I did spend a lot of time helping people which I actually enjoy more than finishing my own challenges. For me, explaining code was just a better way to learn. 

Ruby Racer!!! I love games and was really excited to be programming my own. Although, one thing that you run in to when pairing will be pairs who aren't feeling up to the task. It could be because they might be having some problems, are mentally or physically tired, or just simply don't enjoy doing the challenge. Unfortunately, I let this get to me and wasn't as passionate as I wanted to be doing the challenge (engineering empathy?).

In the afternoon, we revisited two different challenges on boggle board. The first challenge was setting up a board, were you would shake the board and it would land random die in place with random faces - just like the real boggle. (read #ljust)

I really wanted to post starting from day 1, but everything has just been crazy. I'm gonna try and sum it up in 5 minutes and definitely try to be better about my blogging habits after today.

Day 1

Came in lacking sleep, which I'm 99% sure was from excitement. I was feeling tired the whole day, but a good kind of tired - where I was still motivated to do challenges. 

I really want to write more, but with 15 hour days for the past 3 days and with 10  minutes before class starts, I'm just kind of blanking out with day 1.

Day 2

The thing I was really looking forward to was actually yoga. I had only arrived the night of Saturday and I had still been jet-lagged and my body was tense, especially in the neck area. While, we're here to learn how to be coders, it is extremely important to take care of your health first.

Yoga was reallllllly relaxing. We focused on stretching and releasing tension in our shoulders, back, and neck areas, which are usually the areas that people who type in to a computer all day have problems with.

Day 3

A bootmate said something I found interesting. While DBC is only 9 weeks, it is actually more like 18 weeks - what, with all the hours we put in. Days are long and fast at the same time. You're mind is really stretched to its limit. At times, you will feel mentally incapacitated and other times it will be your body giving up on you.

The past few weeks we've been diving in to SQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Because of this I have been missing Ruby terribly. I appreciate it's simplicity and elegance more than ever, especially after working with the likes of JS. 

During our cohorts weekly meet-up, I was introduced to this nifty website: Ruby Warrior!

Week 9 already...wow! If this were actual DBC class, it would be our last week and we'd be expected to be ready for junior web development jobs. Although I have learned way more than I could ever imagine, I definitely don't feel confident enough to take on a web dev job. 

I did the Codecademy JavaScript tutorial way back in October, so when I tried the challenges, it wasn't a surprise that I couldn't remember anything; what, with all the languages DBC has been throwing at us thus far (Ruby, HTML, CSS, SQL). So, I'm currently retaking the tutorial and am consciously being biased now that I know quite a bit about Ruby. 

In Ruby, the last expression in a method is implicitly returned - no need to explicitly type "return" before the line of code.

https://gist.github.com/paopay/e03b7e3a1706fbe5eec4

In JavaScript, this isn't the case. You have to explicitly type "return" other wise it won't work.

I haven't really had time to blog about my experiences as I've been incredibly busy these past few weeks. Thankfully, I'll have A LOT of free time after Christmas and will start going crazy with coding.

Since we're required to write a reflection for every challenge we solved, I thought I'd update my blog with a reflection I wrote. It was for a regex problem that we had. Just to let you know regex is very hard to understand if you're just beginning. It's different from all the syntax you've been doing so far and just generally confuzzling. 

So... I solved all the exercises for the prep phase and now I want more. I've been hearing a lot about Project Euler and got right to it.

Problem #1

The first is always the hardest. My limited knowledge of methods really showed as I struggled to solve this. Without learning #inject, this probably would've been a lot harder.

https://gist.github.com/paopay/2e2225d7dfc27fc62602

Problem #2

Ok. I'm getting the hang of it now. I know recursion would've been better for solving this, but I haven't quite fully grasped it yet. Used while loops for now.

https://gist.github.com/paopay/963642ef8a49731ce400

Problem #3

You can see how powerful Ruby is.

https://gist.github.com/paopay/f14bc977c4b251556994

Problem #4

I found this problem to be pretty difficult. I was stuck for hours and had to turn to stackoverflow for help. It was the method div that was especially tricky.

Looks like someone gave up their spot in the March 10 cohort, so I was able to move mine from March 31st.

Maria shot us an email with instructions for our final prep before phase 0 which included signing up for a whole bunch of social media and coding forums. Also, we were finally assigned a cohort name - the Fiery Skippers - and given access to Socrates. There, I finally got a glimpse of the people I will be spending 9 weeks with. Although we are a pretty big cohort; 26 people all in all. 

We were also required to do some exercises which weren't too hard. If you did all the prep work that they asked beforehand, you shouldn't have much of a problem. I hadn't been practicing that much, so I was a bit rusty with the syntax. 

Before the Interview

After sending in my application, I got a quick response from DBC. I would need to complete a quick course of Ruby in Codecademy and read a few other materials, after which I would interview. I scheduled my interview at the soonest possible slot with Karim, which was less than 2 weeks away. Plenty of time to learn the basics of Ruby...or so I thought.

My only experience with coding was a high school class in QBasic 10 years ago. But lucky enough, I was able to recognize some words and syntax, such as IF-ELSE and LOOP. Even then, I felt incredibly dumb. Most of the time, I'm able to pick up new stuff with relative ease. Coding, however, just seemed like something alien. It was exciting and frustrating at the same time.

After staying in for the weekend and a few nights of little sleep, I was able to finish the Ruby course (the last few parts were brutal). I felt confident that I would be able to keep up with the technical part of the interview.

Day of the Interview

God, was I nervous! It was a good thing I was just staring at my computer 30 minutes before my supposed time slot, as Skype started ringing 15 minutes ahead of time. I answered and opened up my video and I found myself staring at NOBODY. Karim didn't open up his video and it would be awkward if I suddenly disabled mine, so I just left it open. 

We exchanged hellos and he asked if I had any questions. I asked away about the current hiring rate, their way of teaching, and something else I can't remember. Apparently, DBC now has a hiring rate of 98%!! within three months for its graduates (don't make this the basis for applying to DBC, as it might not be as accurate as you want it to be). 

Immediately after, we started on a logical puzzle question. What they want to see here is how you approach the problem. So, it would be beneficial if you ask relevant questions and accept the help that they give (yes, they do hold your hand through the question). Even though I knew how to properly answer questions like these and the question being relatively simple, I still found myself having brain freezes every 20 seconds. All I could keep thinking was "I want this so badly" and "I hope I don't mess up" which ironically kept messing up my entire thought process. I was finally able to stumble to the answer after maybe 15 minutes. Way too long if you ask me.

Next was the technical interview. First, Karim showed me a fairly simple Ruby method and asked me to walk him through each line of the code. I was able to gather myself up and did pretty well. Then came another method which had a few tweaks to the first. I thought I knew the answer, but I was mistaken. He let me know I was wrong and told me why and asked me to explain it again. After fumbling with my words for a couple of minutes, I just said that I honestly had no idea how that particular method worked and that concluded the interview.

My heart sank. There was no way in hell that someone who did this poorly would get in. Karim told me that I would get an email about their decision within a day and asked me if I had any last questions. Out of desperation, I told him that I knew that the interview went horribly and what I could do next. I don't know why he told me then instead of having me wait for the email (probably the desperation in my eyes..nay, most definitely that), but he said that I was a good culture fit and just lacked some technical knowledge and that I would have a second interview.

After more than a month of preparation, I was finally accepted in to DBC. Currently, I have a spot for the San Francisco March 31 cohort, but with any luck I might be bumped to the March 10 cohort. 

I have only seen a blog or two that touched on the actual application process (most blogs where about what went on during the cohort). So, I'd like to share my application and, hopefully, it will give some insight.

Please tell us about your education and employment history.

I have a double major in management and economics. Currently, I'm taking my Master's in Accountancy. Despite all these business degrees, I know now that they are not for me.

My first job was an editorial internship for Playboy(yes, there were plenty of perks). After that, I had a start-up business in the food industry with some friends. It did quite well, but we all decided to put it on hold so that each of us could focus on our own careers. I then moved to New York to work for my father's real estate firm.

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that you have discovered.

I cannot get over the fact that Arthur, from the children's animated series, is an aardvark. It makes me think that the writers of the show couldn't decide what he should be and just chose the first word from the dictionary. I mean aardvark, really.

What is your background with programming.

I had a class in high school where we created a simple video game in QBasic. I also have a limited understanding of HTML. Aside from those two, I honestly don't have any other experience.

Why are you applying to Dev Bootcamp?

I've been in love with computers ever since I got my first Nintendo. From then on, I've spent almost every waking minute in front of a screen - be it gaming, surfing, tinkering, and what not. During high school, I had a computer class where we coded a game in QBasic and made our own website, which I consider to be the most interesting and fun class I have ever had, ever.

Sadly, I never made the connection early on that this addiction of mine could translate to my job. Both my parents are extremely business-minded and have guided me to take the business route as well. I have done so through college and now master's and would have continued to do so had I not heard of Dev Bootcamp. I have always thought to myself that it was too late to change careers. Now, I have the chance to make up for it.

What do you like about our website and what can we do better?

I GOT IN! YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAH BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBYYY!!!

As per my overly excited state, I decided to create a blog just minutes after I found out. Usually, I like to keep my life as private as possible, but I've come across a lot of blogs on DBC that have helped tremendously in my application. Hopefully, others find this blog helpful as well.