I’ve been contemplating doing General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive for about 2 years now. I’ve finally made my move after arriving in London for about 2 months. I thought I’d keep a blog of my journey throughout the course!
Application Process and Prework
The application process begins when you fill in the form on their website. And they will always call you to have a general chat about what you’re expecting, why you want to do the course and your previous experience etc. Then you’ll be given a simple coding challenge which you’ll bring to your final stage interview either in person or over Skype. Even though it’s called an interview it’s really a light-hearted chat to see your understanding of code and problem solving techniques.
Congratulations! You’re now admitted! Now you’ll have to do your pre-work, which consists of career outcomes research and an online introductory course to coding. The online course takes a similar form to treehouse lessons, there are videos, quizzes and a pre-work task which takes you step by step to build a simple memory card game using HTML, CSS and Javascript.
At this stage, complete beginners may still be confused but it’s the perfect time to do your research, go on CodeAcademy and do some online lessons, maybe try to fiddle with your pre-work code and see what you can create. You have 3 – 4 weeks to do this until the course actually starts.
Week 1
Icebreakers! Know your awesome course mates. It is amusing being at a school environment as an adult, everyone comes from different backgrounds, everyone has lots of stories to tell, and yet we are all here trying to do something new and challenging.
First thing that happens every morning is a standup where everyone talks in turn about what they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy on the previous day. Then we will have homework review where a couple of us present our homework from the previous day to the rest of the class. After that we have a teaching session focusing on a topic, a tea break, perhaps a lab afterwards, and then lunch. After lunch, we start on another topic and have labs and get assigned homework.
The pace at which we move on topics is certainly faster than I expected, which was great because it’s immersive, it’s challenging. And for people like me who perhaps have had some experience in web dev before, the homework is a great exercise to get your gears running again.
Typically homework takes around 3-4 hours to complete, and you’ll be practicing those knowledge you learned during the day. They’ll be checked by the TAs on the next day to identify any weak areas that you might have. We are encouraged to stay behind and get started on homework after class so we can ask the TAs and teachers for help if needed. And we get into a really collaborative work environment where groups of us try to tackle a problem together, and help each other out. If we have any queries, us and the teachers are all connected on Slack.
So contentwise, week 1 we covered most topics in the prework (HTML5, CSS and responsive CSS, Javascript(ES6), the terminal, Git and Github) as well as a general view of tech work environments eg. Agile and TDD. Every Thursday morning is an outcomes session where our lovely Outcomes team comes and tell us what they know and what they can do about finding a tech job once we graduate, exciting!
Week 2
Weekend homework was a series of Javascript questions which were preeeety difficult. Lots of googling involved and didn’t get to play much Cuphead even though it just came out! Week 2 felt way more intense than the first as it starts to delve into unfamiliar territories for me. We started learning about the DOM and jQuery and some useful topics that helps us build our first project – a Javascript game (to be submitted end of week 3).
I’ll showcase a couple cool things we made as our homework.
Made this Instagram landing page from scratch on Day 2.
Daft punk sound board using HTML audio and Javascript
Maths game with a timer using jQuery. Do as many maths question as you can in 10 seconds.
Day 8 – Did some pair programming to make Tic-Tac-Toe, from scratch!
saturna 