Before we take a deep dive into the world of web development, it's crucial in this online bootcamp to understand the student expectations from the get-go to ensure your success as a student and developer. Matt Huntington, the faculty lead of GA-WDIR, has taught WDI on the NYC campus and currently teaches online. With over 15 years of professional web development experience under his belt, he's outlined (blunt) words of (real-life) wisdom for excited, ambitious programming newcomers like yourselves!
- Reflect on the WDIR expectations outlined for you
- Identify points, traits, or habits that you may need to change
None.
- Read through the outline.
- Write your answers in the answer file.
- Write down five things that you learned from reading this.
- Write down five things that you plan to change about yourself when taking this class.
- Save changes you've made to
answers.md. (Atom shortcut:cmd+s)
- Ways to avoid distraction
- Change your voicemail to let people know you will not be able to respond immediately
- Set auto reply to email to let people know you will not be able to respond immediately
- Say goodbye to friends and family. Tell them you'll see them in three months. Like you're moving to another country.
- Quit your job/s. It is almost impossible to succeed at WDI while working even a part time job
- Send children to daycare/family members. It's impossible to watch a child and take this course
- Deactivate social media
- Turn off your phone during class time and while doing homework
- If you are late/absent, email all instructors
- A previous student got into a car accident, went to the hospital, checked herself out of the hospital, and was only late by 15mins
- Another previous student was riding her bike, had someone open a car door in front of her, flipped over her bike and the door, got up, and continued biking to class
- Check your homework by figuring out ways to test your answers to see if they are correct. Don't wait for feedback.
- You should be able to answer the question "did I do it right?" on your own.
- In the real world, you'll need to figure out how to test your code to see if it works. You won't have someone to read your code and tell you if you did it right.
- There is no "best" solution. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is, "does it work?" Once it does, then can you start improving your code.
- Try to create a relationship with all other students. You don't know when you'll need a second set of eyes. Sometimes bugs are really stupid, and can be spotted by anyone. It's like writing an essay where your eyes know what you're trying to say and don't see mistakes. Instead of wasting 1 hour looking for the bug, your buddy can help you spot it in a few minutes.
- Finding a job has a lot to do with timing, what the employer needs vs what the student wants to do, and personality matches. Because of this, it's never that the best students get jobs first. Rather, the group who get jobs first will contain a diverse set of students. This group of students who get jobs first are often a way into a company for others, so be friends with everyone. Someone you think would be unlikely to get a job could be one of the first ones to get one and could help you out.
- growth mindset vs fixed mindset
- growth mindset
- people who believe that ability can be learned are highly successful
- fixed mindset
- people believe that ability is something you're born with are not successful
- focus on the learning process, not on the results of your current task
- you'll succeed more and have more fun
- different types of fixed mindsets. Monitor your reactions for these feelings:
- You’re Wrong I Rule: person is unable to accept that they did something wrong
- You’re Right I Suck: any criticism immediately sends person into feeling like they're worthless
- Blame it On The Rain: any mistake a person makes is explained away by circumstance. The person believes this won't happen again, so there's no need to correct
- Optimist Without a Cause: criticism is not important, given everything else that went well
- growth mindset
- Programming is like writing an essay in a language you don't know. Know what you want to say and then research how to say it
- come up with the solution to a problem on your own and then research any syntax you might need in order to implement it. Do not research the answer to the problem itself
- Help out everyone. IAs are often chosen by those who help other students a lot during class
- Plagiarism (passing someone else's solution off as your own) will only result in you getting a job that you're unqualified for and will get fired from
- Your employers will quickly discover that you don't know what you say you know
- If you feel you can't complete the work, come to your instructors and we can figure out a way for you to turn in something meaningful. There is always a solution
- You can usually receive a partial refund or continue in another course if withdrawing for family/external issues. Not for plagiarism. Come to us before doing anything extreme
- The General Assembly name means nothing. Even if you succeed in making us believe you are responsible for plagiarized work, ultimately, when you graduate, you will have only a meaningless certificate and none of the knowledge to back it up
- Do not think that just because you graduate, people will give you a job.
- The education you gain here is priceless, though. In reality, most devs who interview you will go into the interview believing you're unqualified. Your ability to problem solve on the spot and talk thoughtfully about your code is going to be what changes their minds
- Project weeks
- community bonding time. Help each other out
- a chance to simulate the real world and see where you need improvement
- this is where you'll get a lot of practice with researching and debugging
- Bringing up your mistakes during class often illuminates good points to talk about
- it's very difficult as an instructor to come up with scenarios where a student will make a mistake, since everyone makes different kinds of mistakes
- Projects and grades mean nothing
- No interviewer really will be impressed by your projects or your grades. That's because you're still just starting out as a developer
- They will, however, be impressed if you can answer interview questions and talk thoughtfully about your code
- The education and knowledge you gain from projects, homework, labs, etc is what will get you past an interview. Not the actual work itself
- Don't compare yourself with other students. This is not school, where everyone comes in with roughly equivalent experience
- There is plenty of work available for graduates at all levels, as long as you fully understand the work you present to employers
- Don't let problems/questions of any kind (programming or personal) fester. Bring them up immediately to an IA or an IL. If you don't speak up, we will assume everyone's on the same page and keep going.
- Think of the instructors as personal fitness coaches: their expertise will guide you, but you have to put in the reps yourself to see the results. If you want to be a body builder but don't want to do the heavy lifting, a coach and gym are useless. You will not be spoon-fed answers; instead, we provide you challenges to help build your critical thinking as you develop your own ways of problem solving. Always keep in mind that technology is always changing, evolving, pivoting, growing.
- Learning how to debug your own code and read documentation/articles/forums takes practice. This is not really something that can be taught. Make sure you struggle and read a lot on the internet on your own time. Don't immediately ask for help.
- Development is like creating a recipe, it's just a series of basic steps
- Learn what kind of mistakes you make. You will make many, of all kinds. Learn from those mistakes. Track them, write a blog, but be mindful of them.
- Type things out, don't copy and paste. Copy and pasting removes you from the developer's mentality.
- There is a disconnect between knowing something at a conceptual level and being able to use it. Make sure you can do both
- Just because you can look at code and understand it, doesn't mean you can build something like it
- Reading about something and doing it are completely different things.
- We create increasing levels of independence:
- lecture (very hands on)
- -> lab
- -> homework
- -> project (very hands off)
- This is to ease you into what it will be like in real life
- Your community of students is the best aspect of GA. They will help you with finding work and help you when you are stuck on a problem at work.