I’m about five months in, and I am still pumped and excited (if not more excited) about what is to come. I have learned so much, and I know that, but at the same time I also know that there is so much that I don’t know yet. It’s a strange feeling. We all wish that we could just push a magic button and suddenly all of this knowledge would just soak into our brains, but things don’t work like that. It has been a process. There have been times where I felt like I have just stared at code and tried everything but nothing seems to work. I’ve searched online to find answers but either the problem others were having didn’t quite match up with mine, or simply the answer provided by others only confused me more (which is what happens a lot of the time when I end up on Stack Overflow!).

Anyways, first off I wanted to start with the things I don’t like or think could be improved with Bloc. First, sometimes I found the directions to not be as clear as they could be. As a code newbie, I need things explained to me clearly and thoroughly because when you’re new to coding you often times don’t know right from wrong unfortunately. I’m not talking about times where concepts are explained and I just don’t get it. I’m referring to times where certain instructions are left out or I’m told to just do this thing without an explanation as to what the code is actually doing. I want to understand how things work! This wasn’t a big issue in the big picture, but it did happen here and there and my mentor would go “oh yeah you’re supposed to do this, yeah they didn’t do as good of a job as they could have explaining this.”

The second item that could be improved which is related to the first one was how in the checkpoints throughout the program, they would introduce something and briefly explain what it was or not at all and just provide a link to a blog post or the documentation and tell you to read more about it there. What is helpful in classroom settings is that when reading is assigned for example, important topics are then discussed the next day after the reading was due. This helps reinforce what was read and answer any questions that a student might have had on the reading. For a code newbie, looking at documentation is great but it can also be a little daunting and difficult to understand sometimes. It would help if they provided some sort of follow up and reinforcement to that reading for students to get the most out of it. Perhaps having like discussion questions that can be answered and discussed with your mentor. Or maybe a little summary afterwards that helps explain topics that students often have difficulty understanding.

A third and final one that isn’t really the fault of Bloc is that there I wish there was a way to connect with other students in person. It can feel a little lonely at times as you’re coding a way and struggling through some of the material. Bloc has a great Slack channel that helps out with a lot of that but you just can’t replace in person interaction. As this is an online bootcamp, I was prepared for this going in, but some of you might feel more strongly about this than others and feel that you need that human interaction.

See my next post for my list of what I do like!