Reflections from Bootcamp, Six Months In

I’m six months into a programming bootcamp, which feels both impossibly fast and somehow… not fast enough? Time in bootcamp is weird like that. Blink and you’ve learned three new frameworks. Blink again and you’re still stuck on the same concept you swore you understood yesterday.

One thing became clear very early on: the pace assumes a lot of self-learning. Not in a “here’s a gentle reading list” way, but in a “you will ask ChatGPT, panic slightly, read five conflicting Stack Overflow answers, and eventually emerge with a fragile understanding” way. Lectures set the direction, exercises reinforce the basics, but most of the real learning happens alone, after hours, with your IDE quietly judging you.

Which brings me to my biggest discovery so far: I learn the most when I’m building real things. Exercises are necessary — I’m not anti-exercise — but they’re like scales on a piano. Useful, important, occasionally soul-sucking. Real projects, on the other hand, are where everything clicks and falls apart at the same time. They force you to make decisions, confront edge cases, and realize that the tidy example from class bears only a passing resemblance to reality.

Projects are also where you learn the truest lesson of programming:

Programming is 98% breaking things and fixing them, 2% joy.

That 98% includes:

• Fixing something that worked five minutes ago
• Discovering the fix broke three other things
• Realizing the bug was a typo
• Then realizing it was actually another typo
• Then realizing it was neither typo, but your entire mental model that was wrong

The remaining 2%? Pure joy. A test finally passes. The app runs. The feature works. It will probably still look like something out of 1999, making your inner designer die a little. Nevertheless, you sit back, triumphant, briefly convinced you understand computers. This feeling lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to one hour, at which point something else breaks.

And yet — somehow — this is not discouraging. It’s… clarifying. I’ve stopped expecting programming to feel smooth. The friction is the work. Debugging isn’t a failure state; it’s the default mode. Once I internalized that, things got easier mentally, even when they didn’t get easier technically.

It can feel like cheating learning to talk to machines in this vibe coding era, but I've found AI to be incredibly helpful. It can critique my code, and I can ask it questions back, like why did you do this and not that in line 27? Or I ask it to explain one specific code snippet that I can't wrap my head around. I'm grateful to be learning programming now and not earlier. I'm really curious and sometimes I can't do an exercise without understanding down to assembly language, like how does this machine actually understand what I'm telling it to do?

As a recovering academic, it can be hard to get over the feeling that I need a second doctorate in comp sci now. But I try to remind myself that that's not my specific purpose or contribution. I am a builder using new tools to bring my scholarship into digital. Hopefully, I'll be able to bridge the two worlds in the next six months and beyond.