What am I doing?
Fractal Bootcamp <--- website for the thing i’m doing
syllabus and daily schedule <--- how its structured and what i’ll do there
What’s that?
Fractal Bootcamp is a 3-month fully immersive software engineering bootcamp based in Brooklyn New York. It has a intriguing claim of being the liveliest software engineering school around. I’ll be taking part in their second cohort from 23rd September - 20th December.
What seems good about it?
A small class size, rigorous and intensive schedules of ~60h/week, total cultural and technological immersion in the NYC tech startup scene, a focus on real project work from the get-go with immediate engagement in externship work, engagement in ongoing hackathons and workshops each week. teaching Fullstack Typescript with a focus on rapid product development and engineering fundamentals.
Also the prerequisite level of knowledge it assumes before starting is probably close to the end-stage of many typical bootcamps. The technical intake interview assumes that you are pretty confident already building and deploying fullstack CRUD apps with Javascript/React/Express. Which means they don't have to waste time teaching me how to code, they can teach me how to engineer instead!
Here is the proposed syllabus and daily schedule.
Why do I want to do it?
I am pivoting my career direction towards more creativity and creation. I want to get as good as I can possibly get at building beautiful useful products for people.
What do I want to get out of it?
I want to push myself as hard as I can technically, intellectually and emotionally in a container designed specifically to induce rapid education and upskilling and see what comes out the other end. I fundamentally believe the traditional model of education is broken, boring and wastes a lot of time. I’m taking a bet on immersive project-based apprenticeship style education being far more effective for gaining technical skills.
I have been preparing for the past 6-month for this, learning the fundamentals of fullstack software development in Javascript (principally MERN) so that I have a fairly well developed base of understanding going into the bootcamp. At this point I feel comfortable building and deploying fullstack CRUD apps. I want to see where the next 3-months of immersive upskilling can take me.
Ultimately, at the end of this I want to be a competent, technically skilled software developer with a plethora of useful and impressive real-world project work under my belt and the confidence that I can ship good code.
What will I do here?
I’ll attempt to log a little each day about:
- what we did
- new things I learned
- wins
- losses/lessons learned
- growth edges