Surviving DBC

DevBootCamp has been a rough journey, but I know that it will give me the skill and confidence necessary for me to survive in the tech world.

Today, I passed a major assessment in DevBootCamp, thereby ensuring that I will move forward in the program. The feedback I got from my assessor was excellent, telling me my weaknesses (failing to use prototypes in Javascript, accidentally destroying the DOM element instead of simply hiding it, having complicated code when simple code would do). But now that I know these weaknesses, I can now move to correct them. Progress is being made.

I would not be where I was today without asking for help. Indeed, I asked for help a lot during the assessment, perhaps more so than necessary. There has been instances where I asked for help only to be able to solve the problem by myself, with the guide just sitting there watching me explain the problem and figure out what’s wrong. The lesson I learnt from today is that I need to be more self-confident of my own abilities. At the same time, I still need to know when to ask for help…but only when I know when I need that help.

After the assessment, DevBootCamp gives us 1.5 days to work on any project we want, so long as we use an API (Application Programming Interface). I decided to work on Friend-Computer, a program that will automatically generate blog posts. I had thought that the program would take me 2 hours to complete, but instead it took me all day. However, I did manage to successfully create it, and most people are sastified with the results, though there is some critique about the “grammar” of the posts. The lesson I learnt here is that I need to prepare for the fact that I don’t know how long a project would take, and prepare myself accordingly. I must avoid overconfidence, lest I get burned.

Indeed, when I entered into DevBootCamp, I had the intention of updating my blog every week. This, of course, did not happen, as I was more focused on preparing for the assessment than producing content. But if DevBootCamp helps me be a better programmer, nay, a better person, then the experience will all be worth it.