Bootcamp challenges and how I have adapted in the last few weeks

Andela Bootcamp is a two-week intense coding sprint and for me, as a newcomer, there are a few things that challenged me but I managed to bounce back and this story is going to be about all that stuff.

First and foremost comes time. Time has been my worst enemy in the last 2 weeks. As a Bootcamper you’re expected to do a lot of things in a very short time. There comes a time when you blink and 30 minutes are gone just like that hahahhhh… I have come to cope with the time shortage by prioritizing. I organized my tasks by priorities and everything that required my LFA’s attention always came on top of the list. Reason being that the LFA cannot be available 24/7 but I am available to myself 24/7 so you get what I mean.

Challenges come in different shapes and they all kick you in the face. I remember when I was presenting for my first week, I was showing how to post a new property advert to the app and all of a sudden Heroku didn’t respond so I got an error as if that part of the work is not covered. The most challenging thing about that is knowing you tested it a few minutes ago and now it’s not working??? You can’t tell those stories to whoever you’re presenting to. Given that you don’t have much time for presentation, you’re supposed to move on and take that error feedback to be worked on. Now let me tell you a very important tip: Always check the logs if you’re working with a service that provides logs. It’s easy for you to start panicking and start messing up your code for something that is not even yours to fix. After the presentation, it was time to see what exactly was wrong with my stuff. I tested it a few times and it was working as expected and I was like: You can’t do that to me you little piece of code. I couldn’t go back to the LFA and say: now look, it is working! As anyone would, she would have asked me what was wrong in the first place so, I checked Heroku logs and it turns out at that particular time, the server gave us a slow response that got my request to timeout. I had now to tell my LFA what exactly was wrong because this time I was sure. Perseverance and not panicking are what got me through that.

For the last few weeks, the most challenging thing for me was catching up when I was supposed to implement stuff that was completely new for me. For example, in the second week, I was doing the third challenge of the Andela Developer Challenge and it was about integrating a Postgres database and I’ve never used Postgres before in my life so I had to first do some research and then implement it. As I said before, time is not your friend at Bootcamp so, you can imagine all that time lost to getting started with new technology and setting up its environment. It took me a day and a half to integrate it for it to work in the best, expected way. That means I had to work extra hard to compensate my time lost to preliminary stages of the database. Writing endpoints to query that database had to be on godspeed. More than ever, this is when Excellence is required. I had to give it all the best that I got to get it done on time. Satisfaction comes when you see you’re getting back on track and you are hopeful you’re going to beat it. It’s not over until it’s over!

In any environment that you’re new in, you’ll be supposed to adapt to their style of living and working. At Andela Bootcamp, I think the first thing(not a challenge but rather a new habit this time) to adapt to, has to be the feedback. You’ll think you’ve done things the right way but your LFA tells you to switch it up and do it another way. That’s only because they believe in you and what you’re capable of. Take that as a boost for you to go beyond your expectations learn new things and new ways of doing things.

I’ve come to realize that challenges are one of the best ways to learn, so face your challenges, adapt to changes then give them your best and look yourself in the mirror with a shiny smile when you finally beat them.

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