What actually happens in a week of the bootcamp

People ask what a bootcamp week is like, and the honest answer is that it is mostly ordinary work done at an unusual speed. This is week five of the full-time course, the components-and-state unit, as the January cohort lived it.

Monday: the live build

The day starts at 9:30 with a forty-minute talk on why interfaces break into components, and then a mentor builds one live, mistakes included. By 11 you are pairing with someone new, starting the week’s project: a habit tracker with filters and saved state. Monday afternoon is mostly getting a blank project to run.

Tuesday: it works on one screen

By Tuesday lunch most pairs have one working view. The afternoon is spent discovering why the second view does not know what the first one changed, which is the whole lesson of the week arriving on schedule.

Wednesday: the wobble

Every week has a day when nothing works, and in week five it is usually Wednesday. Mentors expect it. There is a thirty-minute “stuck clinic” after lunch where any pair can put their screen up and the cohort debugs it together. It is the most useful half hour of the week and the one people are most nervous about.

Thursday: TypeScript arrives

Thursday morning introduces TypeScript to the project you already have. Half of the bugs you fought on Wednesday turn out to be the kind the compiler catches, which makes the case better than any slide.

Friday: code review and a pint

Friday afternoon is code review. Each pair has eight minutes to show what they built and take questions. At 5:30 the room empties to the pub over the road, and anyone who would rather not goes home without anyone noticing.

Part-time is the same week, slower

Part-time students do this unit over a fortnight: new material on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the project on two Saturday mornings, and the stuck clinic as a recorded video call. Same project, same review, twice the calendar time.