3 things I wish I had done immediately after completing my coding bootcamp
Securing a job after completing a coding bootcamp is not automatic. The good news is that a bootcamp is certainly still a viable option for motivated students, but it's important not to view bootcamps as a means to an end. The right mentality is that "the job doesn't start" until a bootcamp is complete. You should set daily goals and a process that works for you. Never focus too much on one company. It may be that that company does not have a job open right now in the position you are seeking, and therefore your one-sided efforts will be for naught. However, often during the course of your search process, job openings will come up at companies that you didn't even have on your list to begin with.
In addition to mental toughness, here are specific tactics that can be used once a bootcamp is complete:
Create a "showcase program."
Sometimes it's the case that you have multiple projects going on side by side. This is good for practice, but when asked in interviews to "tell about an interesting project you've been working on," it's often difficult to come up with a suitable answer, since no project was actually fully developed. Therefore, there should be a dominant "showcase" project that you can fall back on for this question. Especially if you don't have professional programming experience yet, you can only fall back on your personal projects.
Write down every question you get in interviews
You will be surprised how often the same type of question or even the exact same question can come up in an interview. Often it's the exact same question but disguised differently: "How many floors do you have to walk if ..." or "How many miles do you have to drive if ...". Even if the questions are not completely identical - so you can at least remember the approach to answering the questions for the next interview.
Another problem is that you focus so much on solving the problem correctly during the interview that you think you will never forget the approach or solution again - but you will. It is natural to relax and somehow manage to completely erase our memory of the problems we had the day before. So write down the questions as soon as possible so that you can practice them.
Exchange ideas
When coding, it's easy to get a mental block that is very similar to the "writer's block" that almost all professional writers experience. These can be especially challenging during the rough patch, after completing a bootcamp. You may even have certain doubts and depressing thoughts creeping in.
The truth is that all professional programmers have these phases when motivation and energy are low. The key is that they simply have more professional experience and can deal with it more easily, so it's easier to fight through or overcome the phase. Therefore, look for like-minded people or experienced programmers in the networks and platforms so that they can give you a different perspective on things - and help you out of the phase.
