did you just graduate coding boot camp and now you're worried that you know the Market's rough you're not going to get a job you probably been hearing things it's been increasing your anxiety um I'm going to share some advice with you and kind of a a different perspective with you that I think will help alleviate some of those concerns uh but the very first piece of advice I'm going to give is stay away from r/ coding boot camp it's just a blackpilled community of a bunch of people saying like yep shouldn't went to a coding
boot camp and no one should go to a coding boot camp and if you did you're screwed I'm sorry you got scammed blah blah blah blah blah it's just a bunch of really bad advice where the blind is just leading the blind or like sore CS grads that are not getting jobs or like coming into r/ coding boot camp on coding boot camp grads or students it's just it's a mess I I always have to take an opportunity to on toxic communities like that but I'm being serious just stay away from that Community it is
horrible and it's just going to discourage you it's not really going to give you a lot of practical advice or there's going to be a lot of conflicting advice so I know you think I'm joking trust me with this uh but I'm just going to kind of rant about like because I've been helping people that have been coming out of cting boot camps trying to find jobs and you know quite frankly a lot of C boot camp grads um they went through crappy programs this was true a while back this was even true in 2021
when developers were more easily hired like there are a lot of bad coding boot camps there are a lot lot of bad coding boot camps but it doesn't matter it just doesn't matter coding boot camps should have always just been kind of like a piece of your journey coding boot camps are meant to give you some mentorship it's meant to give you a bit of a um Foundation to learning to becoming a better student to kind of give you some sort of an outline of what to learn and give you some insight into the industry
so that you cover a bunch of topics you don't really get a deep knowledge on a lot of these topics and when you graduate you really deepen that knowledge and you build projects to reinforce everything that you're learning that's the trick when you come out of it that is your opportunity to really build a ton of stuff to or build a deep complex Capstone project to deepen that knowledge your goal is to deepen that knowledge at that point right you are still like if you have a project showcase you're still going to be applying to
jobs every week but majority of your time until you get that position is spent with Project work it's still too early on for you to let the foot off the gas with a ton of coding work spend a ton of time coding afterwards don't give yourself a long break after the program I see so many people give up because they take 2 weeks 3 weeks 4 weeks and then they never really develop a schedule a consistent pattern of growing as a sare engineer and some people will just like latch on to Le code problems and
that's all they do thinking that's going to help them grow and that's going to help them get a job it's a balance of things and I want to talk about that balance right now so when you graduate here's your schedule majority of your time throughout your day or week sometimes you only have like an hour to two to spend because you have to go back to a part-time job or a full-time job or whatever so look at this as a ratio not how many hours you should spend on each thing but majority of your time
is spent on Project work you have to reinforce those skills and you got to build like Project work is just going to build you up as a software engineer once you're past the coding boot camp you've gone through the majority of your coursework phase and as you start diving into Project work you're going to realize there are things that you don't know you're not familiar with and you look up documentation you look up very specific Niche articles to learn it's not heavy coursework at this point majority of your learning comes through Project work and looking
specific things up to be able to progress through your projects majority of your time is Project work please spend that amount of time with Project work a lot of people skip this portion and they don't really grow and they don't really have anything to Showcase which is another thing that you want to consider when you get out of a coding boot camp maybe the curriculum was so bad or rushed or you were rushed through it too much or you had bad mentorship where you don't really remember much that's where a variety of small projects to
reinforce these foundational Concepts or libraries or Frameworks that you've learned come into play you built a variety of projects to reinforce these foundations through different implementations different contexts and and you spend a lot of time doing that after the coding boot camp if you feel like your knowledge is you're a little bit better off with your foundations with your knowledge that's when you dive into a Capstone project a Capstone project is an indepth project that solves a problem that you want to get hired to solve right it solves a problem in a more simplistic way
maybe in the industry in which you are going to be applying Dev to Dev jobs in maybe you want to build Dev uh you want to like build applications that are focused on like they're just common applications you're going to find in the fitness industry maybe it's going to be mobile apps I don't know if like you're going for mobile development maybe that's what your coding boot camp was about if you're going for websites like in that industry what are websites um in the fitness industry going to look like what kind of tools are out
there what kind of dashboards are out there what kind of analytics tools are out there uh in the fitness industry study that and if you for example are really passionate about bodybuilding and fitness like you know apps that can be built that can help you out that could probably help other people out apps that would do things differently than apps that you currently have you're like if you have thoughts of like I wish this did this thing I wish this had this feature that's a new opportunity to build an application that is better than one
of your favorite apps that does things very differently and it's your own kind of unique flavor of how to solve this problem in the fitness industry that's what you're aiming to do with a Capstone project you build a landing page around it you launch it um you know this is just an example of kind of like a mindset to have with that Capstone project you're building something real that you're going to use that other people are going to use and you share it with other people in that industry you share it on subreddits you share
it on forms you get feedback you take that feedback and you continue building that Capstone project up and up and up and up until it becomes very complex and you need now it's like oh I got to manage user authentication a lot of people want to save data um now we you know like what happens if there is a lot of data coming through this application um does my application aggregate a bunch of data every single time someone loads the page like I did with uh an old Twitch API app that I built that crashed
and uh cuz it started out like it would take 30 seconds because it aggregated a bunch of data every single time someone loaded the page until it crashed um and employers could even load it I made that mistake but that's a good learning mistake to make as I would flush out an application that more people used when I was trying to still become a developer so you can do this as an aspiring developer but I kept building that up up and up and up and put it out in front of people until the features got
more complex and it became harder to manage and I had to build better conventions and build better organizational patterns and I really knew my app through and throughout and I could talk about that in the interview and because I had to scale it a bit because I had to keep adding features it created an interesting conversation in the interview that employers wanted to talk about that showcased a lot of skills that I had or skills that I lacked right and that I needed to improve and that was where I could identify that stuff that came
up in the interviews where they're like oh they care about this thing huh is there a feature that I could develop that my users have been asking for that would kind of like add authentication to it because like if I'm applying to fullstack positions a lot of these positions might be asking like how I implemented o stuff how I implemented ooth um which is tricky for new Dev Vel opers to implement even just developing a custom oot for aspiring backend developers can kind of really set you apart from a lot of other aspiring backend developers
but variety of projects to reinforce shaky knowledge and a uh a larger more complex project that you continue iterating on to really deepen your knowledge and build something that really helps you stand out among so many other developers that are just going to continue spitting out cookie cutter apps until they eventually give up because no company cares about those cookie cutter apps that's the mindset you have no matter where the coding boot camp brought you to skill-wise and mindset wise you just use that as a bit of a springboard to then be a better student
learn how to learn have a little bit more of a solidified path and you just continue growing and growing and growing outside of your coding boot camp until you finally land that Dev job oh by the way if you're trying to become a front-end developer I highly recommend you check out scrimba I'm specifically talking about their front-end developer career path they have a fun interactive way to learn how to code and become a web developer and while that's true that's not the main reason that I want to promote them honestly the main reason is their
curriculum is solid there are a lot of curriculums that do not prepare people to actually be competitive in the market and I've reviewed a ton of programs and to this day it is still one of my favorites and one of the best front-end curriculums out there for self-taught developers and they're backed by mdn a leading and well-respected resource in the developer community and I actually personally run my own mentees through the program to prepare them for front-end Developer jobs and if you choose to sign up via my affiliate link below in the description you actually
get 30% off if you sign up for a paid plan but you have to sign up by the end of February to take advantage of that because it expires after that anyways check it out for yourself what do you have to lose and let's get back to the topic that's it we're going to go into a few other details but that's really the plan is no matter where you ended up with a coding boot camp it's ton of project work to reinforce your skills and showcase what you could do with those skills so a little
bit of time should be spent towards coding challenges DSA problems um I don't think you have to go heavy into Le code problems and it depends on you know what you're aiming for you know front end is going to be much lighter on the DSA stuff than backend positions are you you have to study that you have to research like what are common questions or types of questions that are going to be in back-end issues versus front-end what do Mobile Care like what does mobile care about what kind of problems are they going to test
you over these things differ depending on the type of deposition that you go into which is another thing you need to think about you're not going to be that developer just spamming your resume out to every deposition hoping for the best no everyone else is doing that there's nothing that makes you unique with that you have a tailored project plan you have a tailored job search strategy that aligns with more specific positions that's what's going to make you stand out so it's going to be majority Project work uh a little bit of DSA challenges and
then networking and then so networking doesn't mean just sending random connection requests on LinkedIn it means like going to meetups in your local area and talking to other people you don't just go and leave that's a waste of your time you talk with other people just make human connections you believe it or not you don't even have to talk Dev stuff to other people um you just like connect with them you notice a sticker on their laptop you you spark up a conversation then eventually say hey let's stay in touch uh phone number LinkedIn uh
linkedin's really good but like let's stay connected on LinkedIn what is your LinkedIn because you should be talking about your journey the things that you learn the things that you're struggling with the things that you create on your LinkedIn profile you should be engaging with other developers and aspiring developers on your LinkedIn to organically build up those meaningful connections of people that can stand you that want to hear what you have to say that like how you lift them up that like how you challenge them in certain ways and constructive positive ways um linked it
is like that one social platform and listen I I got to say it every time I know it's cringe right you're always going to have posts with people putting their dog down the well taking a video and rescuing that dog and turning it into business advice I know that kind of advice or that those kind of posts exist on LinkedIn I know it's cringe you need to just bite your lip bite your tongue and get through it there are going to be other people that you can connect with that are saying things that you care
to engage with you engage with the things that you want want to see and it's going to teach linkedin's algorithm um that you want to engage with this type of content just like when they engage with your content what you have to say even if it's post on other people's feeds it's teaching LinkedIn that this type of person likes to engage with your content this is the content strategy on LinkedIn you're engaging with people that you want to talk with that you want to interact with and people that engage with you that like you it
teaches LinkedIn what kind of people to push your post out to and that's how you organically build connections and your network in meaningful connections people that want to engage with you on the best platform that you can do it as an aspiring developer and that's LinkedIn as a professional developer in general so bite your tongue with a cringe focus on engaging with the content that you actually like and if people are posting too much cringe content you just unfollow them or just remove the connection entire irely you could do that it's okay it's not a
big deal if you remove a connection because you met someone at um a Meetup and all they talk about is Politics on their LinkedIn it's like I don't want to hear this anymore I'm just going to delete that connection and I got like you know a dozen others that I got this week so networking is about building relationships in the dev industry and you never know where those are going to lead again when you build relationships in the dev industry and you make human connections you uh comedies will often ask the team like who do
we want to hire who do we want to bring in an interview before we even make the job posting right because they they kind of vet you a little bit and they make your resume pop to the top um if you've like bullshitted about how you know how cursor co-pilot is just making developers bad which is a awesome take you have that take that's a win at least in my book maybe some people disagree with it you're not going to connect with people if you have that opinion I don't I don't care you shouldn't care
right but you're just speaking your mind and making connections with people that Vibe with you and when they Vibe with you they want to help you they want to lift you up that's how you network that's how you build connections it doesn't have to be this cheesy thing where you go to like these stuffy networking events and sell yourself like just don't do that just connect with them like another human being spark up a conversation after a lecture sometimes meetups will have um moments at the end of the Meetup or even before or you can
kind of talk to people again sticker on the laptop is perfect um so you could participate in hackathons hackathons are really good you can participate in online hackathons and you go to online discords and make friends and build connections this is what you do this is what you should have been doing all along and hopefully you have because this a long-term strategy to build up your network but you know better late than never start connecting with other developers as a human being that they can stand being around and talking with that's it build meaningful connections
a lot of coding boot camp crads do not do that they kind of just stick to their local Alumni network which you can take advantage of right if you do see alumni from your coding boot camp you can reach out to those alumni and say Hey you know um so they know kind of what program you came from they've the business is already validated that you know that coding boot camp grad from this coding boot camp is a good developer which you hope they are like if they've been there for like two years they better
be a good developer you know if they're just starting you hope they're not a bad developer giving you a bad reputation already but you you don't know that but what you can do is reach out to that alumni saying hey I actually put my application in would you mind uh kind of just like making sure that my resume gets looked at um you could do stuff like that with an Alumni network but expand outside of that don't just stick with your close Alumni network there's so many other cool relationships you can build in the dev
industry focus on that ah what else um I think the thing that I that holds coding bu Camp graduates back in reality they just get discouraged they don't continue growing They Don't Really follow through with a Capstone project which is eventually what you want to do and they continue just throwing just splitting up their attention between a bunch of different things and not really doubling down on anything again you are doubling down on Project work and eventually a Capstone project most coding boot camps aren't willing to spend six to uh six months to a year
in a Capstone project this when I talk about a Capstone project like it gets more impressive the more you dive into it when you provide documentation um if you're going for like a back comp position or full stack you provide API documentation um no matter what position you're going for you have a a proper readme you uh have a landing page is a real thing that people are using and when you spend six months to a year on a project like this it starts becoming a more impressive project to Showcase than like 95% of other
people most people are not willing to do this you want to stand out as a coding boot camp graduate you need to deepen your knowledge spend a lot more time learning after the coding boot camp and showcase that you aren't just a coding boot camp graduate you didn't come out with some random templated project that the coding boot camp uh had you build you are a developer that loves coding you're interested in this you kept growing afterwards coding boot camp was just a stepping stone and you kept going and going and going and you Dove
deep and eventually because you're applying for jobs right after you start graduating but eventually this project this Capstone project the self-branding you're building for yourself as you're connecting with other developers um it just it starts finally getting noticed and you don't know when you're finally going to get noticed but you have to continue moving forward without long breaks to continue growing until developers start reaching back out to start with that phone screening and Technical screenings and when you start getting a pattern of these now you know you're moving in the right direction you've revised your
resume in the right format um the cover letter are finally hitting you following up with employers is fin like your messages are finally like humanized and they're getting people to want to respond to you your Capstone project is getting to an impressive State um and you could provide you know like user analytics and usage uh you could provide like real tangible data from your Capstone project on your resume which looks way better than some random e-commerce app that was built in a coding boot camp that didn't that is just a graveyard project right now it's
just a basic crud e-commerce app that you kind of didn't really spend a lot of time with and do anything with do you see my point I know I'm kind of like I'm really being verbose with this but do you see my point the coding boot camp as a stepping stone and you just continue to grow from there use it as a bit of a foundation even if it's a flaky Foundation to then build yourself into a curious good software Engineers that now starts to get notice because most people will give up and they'll get
discouraged and they'll go to r/ coding boot camp and just completely quit coding I'm going to take every opportunity I can to bring that Community up it's fun um but seriously like not just our coding boot camp a lot of subreddits will be very discouraging they'll be very discouraging a lot of blackpilled people on Reddit let you you want to like find the social media platform that is like the biggest aggregate for depressed people that are just victims and never like encourage each other to take action to improve their situation that's Reddit that is so
many programming subreddits I bash our coding boot camp all the time because I think they're particularly bad but there are a ton of other subreddits and the programming um space within Reddit that are just so discouraging you can get bits and pieces of useful advice and information but if you are someone that's highly influenced and gets discouraged easily by what other people are saying just stay off of Reddit entirely there's so many other platforms that are going to be better than that um LinkedIn for example but yeah I think that's all I have um hopefully
that gave you a better mindset to go into the job search with because I know a lot of you can get discouraged and you know the rates for placements are going down with coding boot camps and they're lengthening it's taking coding boot camp graduates longer to get a job but I can tell you for certain you stand a better chance if you don't quit than selftaught devs
