-THE INTRODUCTION-
Coding bootcamps are rigorous. Students spend anywhere from 60-70 hours a week on coding labs and computer science lectures — all in order to become professional developers. Every day, they build their technical and conceptual repertoires, but because of the intensity, they don’t always understand what’s going on outside the classroom. This information can be just as crucial as the inside information.
-PROLOGUE-
As a tribute to the bootcamp industry and the next generation of software engineers, I wanted to create a way for those curious students to get a taste of the outside world; however, because I’m one of those curious students, I don’t know what I don’t know! That’s why I invited real developers to fill in the blanks. In comes “Bootcamper Versus”, a series of interviews where developers of all levels and backgrounds answer the questions that real bootcamp students have.
The interviews are casual, but informative. Each one will bring something unique to the table and contain some background of the interviewee. Furthermore, there will be a technical portion, and of course some tips on getting a job after attending a coding bootcamp.
For the first post in the series I sat down with Joshua Hargeaves, a friend, and Senior Developer for Bloomberg. Disclaimer: The opinions below are those of Joshua Hargeaves and not necessarily those of Bloomberg.
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-THE INTERVIEW-
Q: Josh, thanks for sitting down with me.
Josh: Anytime, Taylor.
Q: I thought it would be good to start off with your understanding of coding bootcamps. Why are they having so much success in today’s climate, both as a business model and an institution for producing developers?
Josh: Well, one of the so-called “secrets of software” is that the majority of work isn’t that difficult. Most software developers are just plumbing together pieces of code that other people have written. And there are a ton of jobs doing simple things like that, which make it an accessible profession for an academic model like a bootcamp. Also it helps that bootcamps seem to be attracting the right talent, and companies are starving for developers.
Q: On that note, there is a huge increase in the popularity of bootcamps. Is there an over-saturation risk or is software development still a promising field to get into?
Josh: It is a hugely promising field! It is still very, very competitive to hire. You have to pay people a lot of money and on top of that there is a huge skill gap between what employees are willing to hire and what they are actually hiring. If you want to build a future for yourself where you have a good quality of life and you don’t work an excessive amount, software development is the way to go. I think it’s tough to get over that initial hurdle of getting your first job. But once you do, your work life, your growth and learning all continue in a really great way.
Q: Do you have any advice for getting over that hurdle? Anything you can do to make yourself a better applicant?
Josh: The number one thing is to start doing it yourself. Go and build something you want to build. Most learning comes from when you don’t have some prescribed material you’re working through, it comes from when you’re trying to build something real and come up against real world problems. It’s linguistic in nature in that you have to imitate before you speak, but it is necessary to try speaking on your own so that you drive real learning. When you start writing your own projects it forces you to do that.
Q: Is there anything on top of that?
Josh: Another good thing you can do is open-source contributions. Sometimes open source projects add issue labels on their repositories. Find a project you’re interested in and look at their issues. It’s basically people saying “This is broken try and fix it.” You learn a lot of stuff from reading and working on other people’s code. And big contributions can be referenced later on.
Q: Great. Can you tell me how you got started in coding to begin with?
Josh: Sure. I wrote my first program in grade 10, we had an I.T. class that offered two versions: one was pretty generic, but the other one was for kids who were interested in programming. So we made a brick breaker game — that was my very first program. When I went to sixth form college, which is like the two years before you go to university, I studied computing, which is not a great A-level to do, but it was a means to an end. As a part of that you do some programming course work and I had a really great teacher who had a degree in C.S. which is unusual. He was a great teacher. He had worked at a big bank in the city and wanted to take some time off to teach. And when it came time to deciding what I wanted to do at university, I ended up choosing computer science.
Q: What was the C.S. track like there?
Josh: I didn’t do the typical C.S. track. When I went to university I did a 4-year masters program. We did some C, some Java, some functional programming, some language engineering -like how compilers work — but the thing I enjoyed the most was making apps. So when I graduated I ended up getting a job doing that.
Q: In general when you first start making apps, they are very basic, there is not a lot of code. What’s the biggest difference between what you do in a curriculum and what you do in the real world?
Josh: The biggest difference is when you’re writing something by yourself it doesn’t have the chance to get that messy. If you’re the only contributor you know everything about the project. When you go and work on a production app, there is a lot more code and a lot more to understand. Usually when you join a new team. The first six months or so you are still learning the different areas of the code base and what everything is doing. As time goes on you become more comfortable navigating the code and can do tasks more efficiently.
Q: Last one. Is there anything that has you really excited in the tech world?
Josh: Yes, the thing I’m most excited about at the moment is in the mobile space. With native mobile development we have iOS, we have Android, and we have some other platforms, too, like Blackberry 10 for example, which I’ve had to work on . We have these native mobile apps and these different ecosystems, and companies, startups etc. spend such a large amount of money writing the same UI on two different platforms. The native primitives may even look the same at the end, but the code underneath may be different. What we use in our app is React Native. And this lets you write Javascript and that code runs and creates native views on different platforms, and styles them through a common styling system. You can write all of your code, your common business logic, your view logic in javascript, and then if you need to write some native code you can. So the thing I’m really excited about the most is the further development of this platform. The main reason I’m so excited about it is because it removes an incredible amount of redundancy from an aspect of development, which allows developers to focus more on creating great products and less on what essentially amounts to compliance.
Q: Thank you for joining me Josh.
Josh: Thank you.
-THE END-
