As my cohort looks toward the third week of our Junior phase, it seems a good moment to use the rear view mirror and consider what has been achieved so far. The pace is intense, from whichever angle it is considered. The Bootcamp moniker is fair and square, most of my colleagues are struggling to follow the rhythm, and I am certainly in the rear of the cohort. Concepts and technologies are chained to pair exercises and labs. The days are going fast, the coding is quasi permanent, and it reminds me of this saying: “if you can’t take the heat, don’t work in a kitchen”. Of course, there are a few who seem to go serenely with the flow, going through tricky test specs and emerge as fresh as a rose after 3 to 4 hours of intense brain wrigging. It can be easily understood it is not my case. Each day seems to be warfare in the trenches, some a bit more than others.

We’ve been exposed and had to apply a huge number of different tech. The list is already long: some HTML and CSS, NodeJS and Express, some serious approach of data structure, binary search trees and traversing. Add a couple of sorting algorithms and serve hot off the pass, with side of continuous JavaScript to make it nice! The last part of the week was focused on databases, SQL, and a good start on Sequelize. Anybody mentioned a nearby fire hose to drink from? Obviously, the plan is to build a level of familiarity with almost everything needed to build an app in the wild, or at least to have a good understanding of how to do it. All the pieces will begin to fit and mesh together in the next few weeks. But, woaw! Just… Woaw! It is true we have some serious holes in the cloth we are weaving; it would be impossible to pretend having a really deep knowledge of everything we’ve encountered. This is built in the system. It behooves us, students, to fill some of the gaps by ourselves. Already, this is the path of investing in maintaining our knowledge and skills and furthering them.