Today is Sunday. Sunday is a rest day. On this rest day I reflect on 2 months and 3 weeks of the Fractal Software Engineering Bootcamp.
Three months have come and gone.
So much has happened. I’ve learned so much. When I went into the bootcamp I could barely build a calculator or todo list app without help.
Now I can build… whatever I set my sights on.
Language
I love statically typed languages now. I came into this not knowing any Typescript and not knowing anything about types or why they mattered. And I leave having fallen in love with Typescript. With a deep appreciation for how typing helps save your butt. Helps you not make mistakes. It makes code easier to understand and helps your teammates make sense of your code. The more complex your app gets the more thankful you will be to your past self for strictly typing things.
Projects
Until about the 8th week we built new projects every couple of days, incorporating a new concept each week into the project (e.g. webSockets, databases, auth, AWS R2/S3, RAG, etc.). From about the 8th week onwards we built major capstone projects that each took a week to complete. These involved us putting everything we’ve learned so far together, practicing building in teams and pushing ourselves beyond the limits of what we thought we could do.
The projects i’m most proud of having built are: Felt Sense Voice AI Chat Snack Safari Voice Transcription App in React Native Bloom - Chat With Website
Hackathon/Competitions
I’ve taken part in countless Hackathons since i’ve been on the bootcamp. They were an important feature of the bootcamp. There was one big hackathon every month and smaller ones every two weeks or so. I was so nervous going into the first one being unsure of how I could contribute to a team. The first, about a week into the bootcamp, sucked. I didn’t know how to build what I wanted to and I felt so slow.
The second one, about a month in was incredible. I was able to build exactly what I set my sights on — a meditation retreat tracker. I worked on a team with two others who worked professionally as a software engineer and devOps engineer. And I felt like they slowed me down. That was the first time I realised I wasn’t a shit engineer and the bar was way lower than I thought. I was easily able to model the agent-based solution and the necessary stack in my mind, think about data flows and bring to life what I needed to make it work.
Subsequent projects I built at hackathons included: PaperPilot Anthropic-MCP-Project
Yesterday was the final hackathon i’d take part in. I built What Would They Do with a 22 year old NYU student. Although it didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked, we ended up wining the category that we competed in (ElevenLabs Conversational AI). We even won some money!
How I Feel About My Skills
- Good overall
- I’ve worked and interacted with many excellent engineers now and I feel the gap between us isn’t that wide.
- Still feel lacking in many areas — especially system design and thinking about scaling.
- Relatively constrained to Typescript, Python and a little bit of Go. I want to learn C next.
- Lacking an understanding of more complex data structures and algorithms
- Leetcode is weak
- Feel good about my ability to work effectively in teams, communicating well and planning/managing projects
- I really enjoy coding and solving problems
- I feel so excited about the possibilities — i’ve never felt this way before in my career
- I’m cautious but not overly worried about AI making me obsolete as an engineer. I feel that i’m living at the cutting edge of AI tools and i’m trying to incorporate every meaningful new advance into my workflow. I’m using these tools to level up my capabilities and extend what it’s possible for me to build. What more can I do?