What I Built at A Coding Bootcamp: Reynolds of Codesmith

Table of Contents

• Finding a Community to Learn With
• Building his Final Project
• Was Codesmith Worth It?

In the last week at Codesmith, students take part in Hiring Day, where employers visit the campus looking to hire new software engineers. Students interview with employers and show off their final projects. We visited Codesmith’s New York City campus and spoke to one student about his experience at Codesmith, what he built after 12 weeks, and how his ambitions have changed after Codesmith! Find out if Codesmith was worth it for Reynolds Colon.

Name: Reynolds Colon
Graduated: November 2018 from Codesmith’s Software Engineering Immersive
Mark of success: Building a middleware library and increasing his earning potential

Finding a Community to Learn With

• Before Codesmith, Reynolds was in a CS masters program at college where he found there was a huge sense of competition, and students weren’t willing to help each other.
• He realized he had no idea how to build things for the web, so left his Masters to learn on his own.
• He went to a Codesmith meetup – JavaScript The Hard Parts – and learned about functions.
  • Function: a set of statements that perform a task or calculate a value
• At JavaScript the Hard Parts, he found a sense of camaraderie with people who wanted to get together, figure things out and grow as a community. Reynolds saw the value in this, pointing out that “if you help other people get better, you get better as well.”

Building his Final Project

• Reynolds and his team wanted to build a project that would improve something for the dev community.
• They realized that a new update for Apollo meant that Redux was no longer needed to use GraphQL.
  • Apollo: A client side library that uses a GraphQL API to fetch and manage data
  • Redux: An open source JavaScript library for managing application state
  • GraphQL: A query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries
• So the team created a promise-based microlibrary to bridge the store between Apollo’s new upgrade, to Redux. That meant developers would not have to get rid of their Redux code, but could still access new features for GraphQL.
• To build the project, Reynolds had to learn Redux and GraphQL from scratch. His project sounds complicated, but Reynolds actually learned most of this technology at Codesmith!
  • He says, “I don’t think I would have ever dreamed that I would create a middleware library for other engineers to use. That’s not something that I thought I’d do on my own.”

Was Codesmith Worth It?

• Before Codesmith, Reynolds was looking for internships and junior developer roles.
• Now that he has graduated from Codesmith, he is feeling more ambitious and says “Now that I’ve come to Codesmith, I’m not looking for anything less than a mid-senior level software engineering position, I’ve definitely got skills that I did not have before.”
• Was Codesmith worth it for Reynolds?
  • He says, “For me Codesmith was definitely worth it. Before coming here I was looking for positions within the $50,000 range because my technical skills were not polished… But now I know what I know, I’m definitely looking for something above $110,000. That’s something I definitely couldn’t have said beforehand!”

Find out more and read Codesmith reviews on Course Report. Check out the Codesmith website.