The Pre-Work for UCLA Web Dev Bootcamp

The Pre-Work was easy!

It’s practically a joke. But that’s not to say it wasn’t a little helpful. I just think they could have made it a lot more challenging. Although I could have done a lot more too…but I can be a little lazy and procrastinate…

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They sent me a link to the pre-work about a month and a half before the bootcamp began. It is split into 12 sections. Each section is called a “Module” and consists of a short essay, some links, and an assignment. I glanced over it all and thought, “I can finish that in a week. I’ll start now and finish super early!” …and then I did pretty much all of it the Saturday just before the Monday it began only 4 days ago.

I had done the first two and the fifth module before that Saturday. The first two just introduced the whole idea of a coding bootcamp and what web development even was. Very very basic stuff. Just covering all their bases I guess. The fifth module served a real purpose – the assignment was getting all the necessary software and what not ready: Chrome, Slack, Sublime, Git and Git Bash, Heroku, Node, MySQL, and MAMP. The course description shows me we will be using more, but these are all they made us start with.

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The Pre-Work went fast!

Those two modules were so easy I just did them right away. For the rest, I just kept saying tomorrow, tomorrow… Then on that last Saturday morning around 7:30 I finally decide to get down to business (what choice did I have at that point?) and what do I find when I look back over the orientation? The pre-work is due July 7th – the current date was July 8th. I freaked out a little, but thought, “Hey, I paid already, what the fuck can they really do?! I’ll just do what I can.” So I really kicked it in gear and next thing you know, I’m done with ALL of it by 5:30 that night, after taking many breaks, even. Mind you, they claim it will all take at least 10 hours, and maybe up to 30! I took liberal breaks and estimate I worked not even 6 hours that day.

This isn’t just because I’m smart, but just that I’ve learned a bit of this stuff already and the assignments were simple. Another one was about how important typing skills are with associated typing tests and required minimum scores. I met the minimum requirements the first try, screenshot for proof, turned it in. Another module was about what coding is. Then we did a very simple exercise in Scratch. Another was about debugging, and we had to fix up a broken html page. It was stuff like missing quotation marks and commas, nothing difficult.

It started to become actual work (though still not hard for someone slightly familiar with these ideas) with the next modules about html, css, and javascript, respectively. Each taught the basics of these technologies and then had an assignment based on them. None of these took longer than 2 hours to complete and I’m sure, even if I had never heard of them before, after reading their intro essay and googling, I could have completed each of the assignments in under 4 hours.

The last module was about getting employed and what it takes. It’s all stuff you could find by googling, “How to get a job as a web developer”. Then they go over the career services they provide which I can explain in another post later when I start doing those assignments. The assignment was going to a meetup or something like it and networking, then writing about the experience.

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The Pre-Work was... irrelevant?

When I finished it all Saturday night after having just started that morning, I was so relieved I would only be one day late turning it in. Then when I get there on the first day of class, they say it was all due right then on the first day! The orientation just had it wrong and I had raced to finish it all for no reason. Even funnier was when a girl asked on that first morning of class how long until we would get feedback on our pre-work. The response? “Uhh…yeah…we don’t really look over the pre-work. That’s for you.” And all I could think was, “You motherfuckers”.

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