It's finals week of DBc-- or final project week, anyway. We present on Friday, which, for my team at least, means we'll be spending all of Thursday moving our code to production and debugging and putting on what final touches we can sneak in, which means we have one day left to identify and implement core features. It's frustrating to think of all the things we don't have enough time to build before we demo, but at the same time, we've accomplished so much in six days' time.
Today I felt incredibly solid. No walls, no struggling, just learning and lots of smoothly-flowing doing. (I also finally filed my nails down today. Related? WHO KNOWS.) It's worth mentioning because for the last week, I've been consistently vacillating along the border of the learning and panic zones, and the mental taxation has been nonstop. Also didn't help that all the non-academic aspects of my life were recently given a good shake-up. Suffice to say, in the Git repo of my life, once this DBc branch is finished and committed to master, there is going to be a merge conflict and there is no getting around that. Regardless of what I end up saying "yes" to, saying "yes" to anything means saying "no" to at least one other thing. Assuming, of course, I'm even presented with options? And now this all feels like waiting to be asked out to prom. Ridiculous.
I will confess that as much as I'm enjoying getting to focus on a single project for an entire week, I'm now also looking forward to Phase 4 because I miss working with my entire cohort. Even though everything preluding final projects was pairing, because we were all working on the same challenges, we all still talked amongst ourselves frequently throughout the day and it all felt like a collaborative exercise across the cohort. (Mitch echoed my sentiments on this tonight, so I'm not entirely alone here.)
What I guess the nebulous point of all this is: graduation is stressing me out a little because it means having to seriously start thinking about saying good-bye to people, even though we're sticking around for Phase 4, though that's just delaying the inevitable for 3 more weeks. And the fact that I've become so fond of DBc people is something I never, ever anticipated, and before this rickety train completely derails here, the thing I am trying to say is, Dev Bootcamp is not about learning to code. There are a lot of schools that follow this high-intensity-hands-on training method, and I don't know anyone who has gone to the other ones so I can't speak for them, but what I've realized about Dev Bootcamp (as early as after the first week here) is that the "Dev" stands just as much for "self development" as it does for "web development". And I love that about DBc. And I get that not everyone else does, that lots of people don't want to drop twelve grand to sit in a circle and talk about feelings and be super introspective and be forced to do yoga twice a week or have to do improv. And that's fine, because there are web dev intensives that are only about teaching programming.
What makes DBc so meaningful is that it is also, if not equally, if not predominantly, about teaching being-a-better-human, regarding both the relationship you maintain with yourself and the relationship (yes, singular) you maintain with others. And because programming is just language and language is communication and communication is interaction, learning how to be a better member of the human collective ultimately makes you a better programmer and vice versa.
The media love to talk about how DBc graduates can make impressive salaries right out of the gate and how a four-year college degree can basically be replaced by a nine-week course, but man, those are the wrong reasons to be here. Here specifically, here at DBc. It's something to keep in mind, if you're thinking about doing a web dev intensive and you're wondering how to choose a school. Obviously come to DBc because you want to learn a valuable technical skillset, but more than that-- come because you want to learn to be a better version of yourself.
