Our primary product here at Coders Campus is developers who work independently on a team and contribute their value in a way that is appropriate to the way dev teams work, world-wide. The magic happens when a dev learns the basics, but also when a dev learns to struggle through a problem for hours, not seeking help from team members every 15 minutes (and thus, probably getting fired, as a result). This whole process of learning how to struggle is the hardest part of the bootcamp. It is 2/3 magic and persistence, and 1/3 plain old luck. For most of us it is also quite unpleasant at times. But through this, we come out the other side able to solve problems we never dreamed we could solve. We start out thinking we need knowledge, and instead we learn that it’s a little bit of knowledge and a whole crap-ton of problem solving strategies, research, and just staying organized when our emotion are telling us to run away.
For all of this, we created the 4 Hour Rule for CodersCampus students. The rule is simple. Please struggle and fight your way through any question or problem for 4 hours before even thinking about asking for help.
It’s a brutal rule.
But if you follow it, you will gain your independence. And we have proved time and again - it really works.
There is also a corollary to the rule. Don’t go too far in the other direction, either. We have some VERY stubborn students who will work for weeks on a problem before seeking help. No, really, I’m not kidding. Don’t be that guy. Once you hit the limit and maybe go a little further … commit your code to github!
Please no screen shots. Describe exactly where in what line of what file you are not seeing the result that you expect, and why.
Publish your github repo IN ONLY one place on slack - don’t spam more than one place or person if you don’t want a bad reputation as a spammer. Wait an amount of time that is reasonable.
Your emotions may be out of control at this point, but don’t forget other people have lives and emotions too.
This is the most critical skill you will learn during this bootcamp!
If you find yourself stuck in your code, spend 4 hours trying to fix it yourself, this means googling different things, looking on stack overflow (which will most likely pop up in your google searches), Chat GPT, re-watch the coursework video’s a few times, etc. So spend 4 hours researching before you reach out for help on the slack channels, or messaging an instructor on slack, this doesn’t exactly apply to the check-in’s, if you are stuck and there is a meeting in and hour and half, bring it and we’ll help you.
You will have to get good at researching on your own when you are stuck. Even once you are working, there is no way you are going to be able to memorize everything to do with coding. Googling, asking Chat GPT, Claude AI, looking on Stack Overflow (kind of like Reddit for devs), looking at YouTube videos, and REWATCHING the coursework videos are just jumping off points.
Absolutely! If there is a student you admire or click with, or just want to know better, it’s always appropriate to reach out to them even if you are in foundations and they are in full stack, it’s a good refresher for them so 9/10 they will help you unless they don’t have time, etc. You can also reach out to another foundations student who is ahead of you.
When you do ask for help, please do so on the computer you have your code on, NOT your phone or another computer. And if you message someone for help, please make sure to have your slack notifications on so if they message you back there isn’t a long delay in your reply.