Boodhoo, Bootcamp & Bentley’s

By my estimation, Vancouver can be accurately called the city of small dogs, acrylic nails and metro-sexual men. They love expensive cars, chocolate & strawberry crepes, pink cosmos and being tanned.

I enjoyed my stay, being a tourist in Vancouver suits me just fine. I love hailing cabs on the street, and shopping until 9pm on a Sunday. This is not a comprehensive review of the city, as I didn’t have much time to do this being that I was there for the Nothing but .NET boot camp experience.

The course was awesome and JP did not disappoint. Day one started at 8am. I showed up somewhere around 8:20am ( I’m not a morning person ). I don’t think he held it against me though. We went through so much during the week that I couldn’t cover it if I tried. While he adhered to his previously successful recipe, there was still room to let discussions and code evolve organically and we had time for sidebars and deeper explanation and way too many jokes.

I can offer a general week-overview as follows:

• Mocking
• Testing-first
• Avoiding Repeat
• Leveraging .NET advanced language features in c#3.0
• 101 Patterns for different area’s, results e.t.c.
• BDD, DDD
• Tools

To focus on what I want to learn more, I plan to:

• Read, read, read
• Play a lot and practice often ( specifically BDD, TDD using Mocking)
• Get a good laptop
• As always improving my understanding of the new tricks in the c# language, the frameworks
• Leveraging more patterns, principles and OO fundamentals!

About JP and my classmates I made these observations:
JP is a really open person, but not uncomplicated. He laughs easily which is endearing. He is passionate and energetic in his delivery. I respect a lot of his life choices, admire his imagination and skill.
Classmates were widely varied but all very-smart people in their own right. I felt challenged by most of the people I worked with and I would consider myself lucky to work with any of them. I will keep in touch with as many as I can!

If you’re thinking of taking this course:

• Make sure you can put in the hours. It’s called a bootcamp for a reason. There were a few people who despite knowing the reputation of the course still wanted to quit early. Even though I was tired and could sympathize, I felt people were ill prepared for the hours.  JP never once complained and was accommodating enough to acquiesce any request for a break. There were some troopers who despite being tired on various days still kept up with the pace and the hours.
• Study hard before you go. You will get more out of it. Read what he asks, there is not a single second of introduction. Day 1, Hour 1 you’re in deep and it doesn’t stop for 5 days. Despite this, our last day was almost 24 hours. And we still had so much to talk about and learn. JP said once that 4 months wouldn’t be enough. He was right, the course is just the beginning. The message is to continue learning and to stay motivated and engaged.
• Make sure you get some JP time. Ask questions, think through each exercise to stay engaged. Make sure you get some time at the keyboard as well!

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback