If you want to learn how to code and are thinking about doing a Coding Bootcamp, my diary might give you a good insight. I completed the Le Wagon (Hybrid) Coding Bootcamp in Berlin this December and had a really good time! Over nine weeks we learned Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and much more – check it out! Feel free to write me if you have questions, this diary is rather based on my personal and emotional experiences than the technical side of it. 

[ Week 1, Day 5 ]

Oh.my.god. What a week! It was the most stressful and exhausting week of my entire life (I’m going to say this sentence a lot during the next couple of weeks, believe me). And that’s not entirely because of the Bootcamp! Well, I was nervous and a bit insecure at first, getting to know the people and the working pace and atmosphere. But I got used to the workflow pretty quick. I remember the very first day, working with my buddy. I was so focused and stressed at the same time, that I was working ahead of my buddy just to finish everything in time (which is not really what a good buddy should do).

But getting to know Ruby better was so fun! At the same time, my Airbnb experience was a disaster. I got bitten at night from an undefined animal and I had an allergic reaction, my left hand is swollen and I have three other bites too. I panicked hard, and moved in the middle of the week to my brothers shared flat. I had to go to pharmacies and the hospital and all of that before and after the Bootcamp office times! But at the end, on Friday, when we went out for a beer and celebrated our first week, I was really happy. A big congratulation to myself! Can’t wait to see what happens in the next weeks…

[ Weekend 3 ]

Three weeks into the Bootcamp, but it feels like months and month of knowledge in my head. This week wasn’t fun for me, to be honest. It first started really exhausting with the delivery and cookbook exercises, which are our first MVC codes. I mean it was actual fun having the first interactive application built. It’s just, so so exhausting cause its super complex and at first confusing. After that we got to know SQL and how to work with Databases. I don’t know why, but I find it quite boring.

Moreover, I might feel a lack of motivation since they were telling us that it is not really needed once we got a job, nevertheless we have to understand how it works. But this week is over now and I am still keen to learn more and more, I can’t wait till we get to the Front-end part. The workspace gets more and more empty though, because people get sick or are afraid of contamination. I just hope the Bootcamp must not go fully remote. I wouldn’t bare it, working all day long from home. I pray its not happening.

[ Week 4, Day 1 ]

Okay, I had a really stressful start in the new week. Home office suuuucks! Last week we had to go home cos one from the batch got tested positive. That means two weeks of being on your own. But luckily I finally was able to move in my brothers shared flat, so I got a room on my own. After having a really fun week of design and front end with HTML and CSS, we are now diving into JavaScript which is hard at first to adapt. It’s like: in Ruby we do it this way, but in JS you have to add this, this and this parenthesis! I hope it will get easier for me to adapt in the next days!

Also, today was pitch night what means that we could present project ideas for the last two weeks of bootcamp work. I did not have the time and space to come up with a good idea but I was more than happy about all the other ideas that got presented. Now I have to see in which project I will end up (decided by an algorithm). It’s getting more and more serioussss.

[ Week 5 ]

Ruby on Rails week has finished! Hard to believe that over half of the bootcamp is done and project weeks are starting soon! The first view days with Rails where extremely overwhelming, I felt like understanding the bare minimum and not being able to take all the new Input coming day by day. But to be honest, after three days I got comfortable with Rails! And it is fun actually once you know the flow. We got our first portfolio project on Thursday and Friday which was interesting – cause puzzle pieces come together 

[ Week 6, Day 1 ]

Today was the worst day of the whole camp I guess. After like coming back from quarantine, I found an empty office. Only a few people came back. And I was like are you kidding me I could have done a remote bootcamp at the first place – super frustrating! And when I discovered that all my teammates were planning on staying at home as well I crashed completely. It’s not like I don’t understand them to some degree but more about my situation of being alone in the office and having a more difficult workflow with phoning eachothers constantly. So yeah, I had a Chat with the Managerin of the Campus but she was like „Theres nothing we can do, it’s a pandemic and a rare circumstance”. Omg and the first day of working on the airbnb clone is hard as fuck as well!! I was more then done in the end. Second day almost the same.

[ Weekend 6 ]

I started watching David Ickes documantary “Escaping the Matrix”. And it totally resonates with me. It is also what a friend told me the other day – that learning how to code is giving me the ability to understand how the world works in a more outer-spectre way. We are living in a world which is perceived as being solid and limited. This is generally accepted as the truth by society and its science. Even tho it has already been proven due to quantum-physics that it is not true, that we are living in a reality of non-limitation and all-potential. But because we are living in this fake-reality, the matrix, that is telling us that we are limited in all ways possible, one must ask, who is it then who’s controlling the matrix?

And another thing is: the way our matrix works is the same as our computers work. There has been some experiments and proofs by scientists in the US. But by stepping out of this matrix, by seeing the whole picture, by having a plug in cable in the back of our head (like in the matrix movie), we can see that our MIND, BRAIN, HEAD is the de-coder of the reality. And by giving certain information to our de-coding process we either experience the matrix we are living in or we are able to see beyond.

By controlling the information we receive, ‘they’ control over our reality perception. And we are decoding the information our five senses can get, the frequency and vibrations around us in a “solid world of matter and coincidences”. So that we are getting code and are the computers to decode it and display a “webpage”, a picture of what seems to be around us. Even tho it is only frequencies. CRAZY. Virtual computer games with the newest technologies (or AI) are therefore just hacking our decoding process and manipulating it.

[ Last Week ]

Only one week left. WHAT?!!. I am going to miss this time a lot I guess. I met so many amazing people during the bootcamp. And even the lectures in the morning and evening are going to be missed. The last week is just gonna be coding from 9am to 6 pm cause we need to get our final projects done. I am pretty content with what my team reached so far. Our app is quiet basic and minimalistic but I like our workflow. We had demo day on Friday and I was amazed by all the other groups projects! Within weeks we learned how to build a web application. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of contact between us cause everybody stays in their group. But at the end of the day we normally meet at the entrance of Le Wagon and chat and cry together, haha. The morning lectures this week were more like extra information and stuff we likely won’t apply for these projects. But its good to know it anyways, I just wasn’t really concentrated.

Looking back…

…I am so glad I did it! Not only am I able now to build websites and have a solid base of my first coding languages, but also I got to meet an amazing and friendly community of Le Wagon coders! We had a wonderful batch, really good teachers, a fun time – despite what’s happening worldwide at the moment and really interesting projects! Of course, it was extremely stressful at some points, but if you go there with the right mindset and the right motivation, nothing can stop you from nailing it!