WEB DEVELOPMENT
Having finished University in 2022 and contemplating what to do next, I considered many options, particularly the possibility of completing a master’s degree. But after researching many courses and considering the potential benefits of them, I didn't find anything that I thought would be beneficial enough to my future career plans that was worth the commitment and financial contribution required. But as I was still eager to learn in some capacity, I decided to put my resources into something more practical, and I took part in a Web Development bootcamp. I made this decision because Web Development skills seemed very practical in the modern world, and I really liked the idea of being able to construct my own simple web applications in the future.
When I made the decision to enrol on the course I was travelling around Latin America, and conveniently the company that I chose to do the course with, Le Wagon, have campuses all over the world. The courses are also taught in English regardless of the destination, so I decided to complete the course at the company’s Rio de Janeiro campus, just a few streets away from Ipanema beach. As well as being an exciting destination for me to spend a few months in, it made sense to me to complete the course in a place where I could make professional and social connections in a region other than my home in the UK.
In terms of the content of the course, it covers a variety of areas relative to front-end and back-end development, particularly the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails application framework. The first 6 weeks of the programme are dedicated to learning and practicing, and then in the final 3 weeks the students work in groups to produce a web application from scratch. All of the students were asked to pitch ideas to the entire class and the most popular ideas are then used in the final three weeks, with a group of three or four students working on each idea. I pitched an idea for a football fan network in Brazil that would help to connect tourists with local fans, so that tourists could overcome some common issues and anxieties that are experienced when trying to obtain football match tickets in the country, whilst at the same time creating a social and cultural experience for the tourist and the local.
I was delighted that my idea was chosen as the most popular idea in the group, which meant that me and three other students were to spend the next three weeks turning the idea into a real application. During those three weeks there were many doubts and stressful moments, but we managed to pull together and deliver a pretty impressive application in the end. On the final day of the course, we had to present our application to the entire group and a live audience on YouTube, mainly made up of friends and family of students as well as the students at the Sao Paulo campus. You can see the vidoe of me presenting our application via the link at the bottom of the page. All in all, it proved to be a very intense and enjoyable 2 months. Some of the material was perhaps more advanced than I needed, but overall it was a very rewarding experience and has given me the tools to build my own web applications such as my personal website.
Link to presentation (fast forward to 2:20).
