Cheeseburger with stethoscope

The benefits of cooking AND eating

29th of June 2014

Watching Shereef’s fireside chat got me even more exited about the program. That is because Shereef cleared up some things for good. Here is a short list of questions I wasn’t sure about:

  • Since we (the students) come from various, very different backgrounds, how to make sure that anyone is enabled to get the most out of DBC?
  • Are the ones with prior experience, e.g. Computer Science majors, in an advantageous position?
  • Are those people going to be unchallenged and bored?
  • Are the ones who don’t have prior experience going to have a tough time following the pace?
  • How important are the actual programming languages we learn regarding the goal to become developer?
  • Why is there so much emphasis on the importance of emotional intelligence?

This is DBC’s answer to „skill gap between students“ issue:
First of all, you should think of the following analogy. Shall San Francisco be the metaphorical starting point in the carrier of a developer, and Seattle be the point where the developer reaches a proficient senior level. Then some of the students walked just zero or maybe 5 steps towards Seattle and some already walked 500 steps. But this is only a small fraction compared to the overall distance.
DBC has to solve one more problem there: what about the people who are not just more experienced, but even learn faster than the average.
In order not to shackle those people to much, DBC introduced the phase system. That means, that the students are assessed at the end of one phase (three weeks), whether they are still a good fit for the community. If they are struggling, they are invited to repeat the phase. In rare cases they are asked to leave (getting the money back).
In my opinion this is a fair system. It may sound a little tough, because every student sacrifices a considerable amount of time and money for attending Dev Bootcamp. But it’s not the case, that you - as a student - aren’t geared up for what to expect. That’s because of the fairly long and more or less intense prep phase. I think because of this argument it’s fair enough to support the more advanced ones.

Like Shereef said, DBC is not like school, where tests/challenges are graded and you have to achieve a specific score. You should learn everything that is taught to you by the mentors. But it’s completely up to you and your fellow students what you are building on top of that. For me that’s a great thing and opens up a space for huge opportunities. In my mind this pretty much means that we have the freedom to create awesome things, the way we want them to be. That’s the part of the video that got me really excited. And it also explains why a high EQ and the ability to be empathetic are more important than having a high IQ. DBC is an „Us“-experience rather than a „Me“-experience. The students are going to communicate all the time and also build apps together. This would even be the case if you’d be a genius who is better in programming at all fields. That’s because two people can produce more code at a time than one student could. As projects are getting bigger and bigger, there’s just no way around working together in order to finish within the given timeframe.

Besides the productivity argument there’s also the learning and creativity argument. I think you learn faster when learning and teaching with two or more people, and also the ideas you are generating can be much more interesting, because every person has a different view of the world and the problem. I see ourselves as chefs and restaurant visitors at the same time. We’re constantly cooking and eating, i.e. we are coding and we’re reading code, having a look at a new app, giving feedback. This way, the learning curve is very steep, because everyone has influence on the development process, and everyone has other tips and ideas.

I also learned from the video that we’re not only learning Ruby on Rails (or Javascript or…), but we’re learning how development works in an abstract, reusable way as well.

All those point lead me to a thrill of anticipation because it pretty much meets my expectations, and I can’t wait to walk inside the DBC Chicago building!