As a tutor for a coding boot camp, and as a former student, I often (not always) see learners struggling with a variety of concepts, while their confusion originates from the same source. They don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. And honestly, I spent a lot of time trying to dig myself out of the same hole.

I took an in-person boot camp instead of an online class primarily because I hoped to benefit from an instructor with real developer experience. I wanted someone who could answer my questions and give me real-world scenarios.

These courses are often offered as a speedy way to jump into a new career, which is why the “boot camp” market is booming. However, it’s that same speed, promising near-instant gratification, that has made the curriculums somewhat flawed and difficult for students to scale beyond classroom assignments. Students blitz through HTML and CSS and hardly spend much longer on Javascript before they’re applying that knowledge to Node and all its packages etc. And the focus is heavily on the relatively simple applications being built for class or homework, without much discussion about how those concepts scale.

So, what exactly do I think is missing?

The foundational focus on how and why we should make code clean, efficient, and scalable. Of course, these are principles that students can learn on the job or through their own research, but they are also principles that help students understand what it is they’re doing in the first place. I put in between 50 and 65 hours per week during my fulltime boot camp. I made a tremendous effort to research topics outside of class. But the fact that my boot camp didn’t effectively cover concepts like algorithms or OOP early enough in the program ultimately muddied the waters more than if I had simply tried to learn everything on my own from internet research.

I have recently been taking the MITx Intro to Computer Science course through edX. All I can say is that I wish this is where I started. I could have spent my time in the boot camp applying my knowledge of OOP and different algorithms to what I was learning, rather than simply struggling to keep up with the pace of the course. In turn, I would have emerged from the boot camp as a developer with a complete foundation for the workforce. Instead, I felt like I needed more time before I could honestly sell myself as a developer with potential.

Even in something as seemingly simple as CSS, the concepts of speed and efficiency that are core elements of computer science have been applied to build methodologies for styling (like BEM). Looking back at style sheets for my boot camp projects, I can’t help but cringe. I attempted to organize them, but let’s face it … I had no idea what I was doing. Can you imagine the backend of those applications? I also had no concept of how all of these elements, from front to back, could impact an application or even why I should care. One algorithm demonstration in my comp sci course changed my perspective immediately.

If I could go back and do my boot camp over again, I would have done a few things differently:

• I’d have taken an intro to computer science course first. You can jump into one for free on edX, and I can’t recommend it enough.
• I would have spent more time utilizing free learning resources for Javascript, like Codeacademy, before the boot camp began. I perused these resources, but when the camp said I could start with zero knowledge, I believed them, without realizing the consequences. I already knew quite a lot about HTML and CSS, and the difference between those parts of the course and everything that followed was remarkable. In the first part, I had time to worry about things that we barely touched on in class, like CSS selectors … later on with topics like React … not so much.
• I would have searched for jobs that work with my lifestyle to help me decide which languages I wanted to learn. As a military spouse, my requirements for a job are pretty defined. I don’t get to choose where I live, so a remote position is ideal. Not every development skillset translates well to a position that fits the mold.
• I would have used all of this knowledge to better assess which boot camp was right for me, and I would have asked more questions before choosing one. Hopefully with that knowledge, I could have made a more informed decision about which languages I wanted to learn.