Project week is always just around the corner for those in software engineering bootcamp. You learn a new language for about a month and now suddenly you have to create an app in one or two weeks and hope that it doesn’t break right before the deadline. It is intense because there are strict deadlines but here are some tips I learned along the way that might help.
- Do not spend more than a day on thinking about what you want to do for your project. Or better yet, try to decide BEFORE your project week even starts.
Time is ticking. During project week, time goes even faster than usual. One day spending on deciding what you want to do for your project is a whole day you could have spent building it. Of course you want to choose what you want to do based off of something that means something to you. Something you are passionate about. But I have observed that some people will take several days to get started because they haven’t chosen what to do yet. Please do not ever get into the pattern of doing this. As long as your app idea would meet the minimum requirements, just go for it and at least start on the foundation of your application. You can always update it later.
2. Focus on the minimum requirements BEFORE getting creative.
It is easy to get ahead of yourself and you want to start building certain features right away as soon you are done with the basic skeleton of your app. Investing in those features that are not mandatory can cause you to rush in finishing up the requirements right before the deadline or cause you to fail your project review assessment. When you start planning out your app, you have so many ideas of what you want your app to do or look like. But even if all of that was working great, it would not matter if one of your project requirements was to have a DELETE button and you did not get it to function correctly.
3. Make sure to test your features over and over again.
During my Rails project review assessment, I was pretty confident because I had completed all the requirements and my application was working the way I wanted it to. But my reviewer suddenly asked me to change the url and then I was able to view another person’s account. So be prepared for the reviewer to try to break your app. Try to break your app before your review and see what you can work on or fix before so you will not have to experience what I went through.
4. Do not be afraid to ask for help. Even extra help outside of your cohort.
My cohort experienced an interesting situation where our cohort lead notified us last minute that he would not be available for a certain amount of days during project week. The thing about bootcamp is… Is that we can only really get help from our cohort lead and our cohort lead only. I mean unless someone in your cohort is available to help, which they usually aren’t because they work full-time, are struggling with their own projects, are super busy, etc. Remember that you are paying for this education, so reach out to another cohort lead or ask the manager to schedule more office hours for your cohort. It really doesn’t hurt to ask. In fact, most times it worked out for the better because the students and I made that effort to reach out for more assistance.
I hope these tips can be helpful in any way. You can also learn so much from your cohort lead and how other people work on their projects. Remember if you need help, don’t be afraid to ask!
