Well finally, this is it. The last commit to my final project took place a few hours ago. I am currently in the process of taking care the last few details before the project submission for review. One of them is to write this final blog post. Although I am supposed to detail my development experience of the final project in this post, I will probably focus mostly on the whole experience of the Flatiron School Community Powered Bootcamp, that now draws to an end for me.
It was a very long time ago when I first enrolled to the program, thinking that I would be out of it in 6 months. I am a professional computer scientist anyway, so I thought that this would be a lot easier for me than others. Having to juggle life, work and a major learning/training experience proved to be quite challenging at times.
Was it worth it? Definitely. There is a lot of material in the course to keep you occupied for a long time. I do agree with the school on their view of providing reading material mostly instead of videos. I believe it is a better way to keep you focused. I hope that they manage to redo their front-end section, which is mostly videos and quite boring to get through.
Comparing the material on ruby + rails with what is available for javascript + react + redux, I found the material after javascript to be lacking a lot in detail. There is absolutely no material or projects on building the server side on JS, although it was somewhat implied from the marketing material that you go through before deciding to enroll. This was a major disappointment as far as I am concerned. Generally speaking the industry has moved on and flatiron school seems stuck in the past with ruby and rails. Which is all well and good and very useful and relatively easy to teach/learn, but a coding bootcamp should be focused in my opinion on the tools mostly sought after from the industry at any given time. I would have expected the use of ruby and rails to introduce computer and web application programming at the beginning but then I would have preferred focus to shift on JS and current JS based tools.
Another major negative point for the course is the lack of in depth training concerning writing tests. They go through the material for rspec (although they do not bother with JS at all) all the labs are mostly test driven, but the tests are already there. The course does not require you to write tests at all, not even for your own projects. I understand that people new to programming may find it awkward having to write tests before they actually write their application code, but again this is the way the industry works. This is definitely an area that the school needs to improve considerably.
Finally a few words on my final project. I have chosen to implement the same idea more or less for the last 3 projects, in order to be able to compare between different frameworks and technologies available and identify the strengths and weaknesses of each. Therefore, here is MovieDB-react a single page client application powered by react + redux, also using a rails-based API server.
The time has finally come for me to bid you all farewell!
Take care and enjoy life as much as you can!