What to work on after the boot camp

The time after the boot camp is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it gives you time to learn at your own pace, and what you want. But also a curse; since there’s no real pressure to actually complete work or get things done, which easily leads to you abandoning your projects at the first bump in the road.

Marcus “tech geeking” approach

My preferred approach, for my own times like these, is to geek out on the tech and use a well-known domain for my projects. Here’s what I mean; I build something that I know well, or have done before, but use new technologies and just do it over and over.

For you I think a good list of features that should be included in your build are:

Has both front-end and back-end parts
Stores data in (at least) one database
Gets data from an external API
Deployed and working
Code made public through GitHub

Other things that I usually include but is not mandatory:

Authentication (different kinds)
Testing

When it comes to choosing a domain, select something that interest you, or solve a problem for you. But keep it reasonable small, with features that gives you work for a week or two.

An example that I have been using is a music library for the band I play in, in my spare time; the Vasa Band. This is a simple app where we can track information about all the music we have in our library (4600+ titles).

It has some very simple features like search, CRUD, and log in - but that gives me a lot of possibilities to try it over and over:

Build it in React with a Mongo Db
Build it in React with a My SQL database
Build it in React using TailWind CSS
Build it in React using Styled components
Build it in React using Firebase (auth and store)
Build it in Next using Firebase
Build it in React Native
Build it in vanilla JS
Build it in Vue
Build it in Svelte
Build it in Elm
Build it using a JAM-stack
Build it using another JAM-stack toolset

Other project ideas

See how the domain stays the same, and I can probably reuse code and focus on learning new technology. You can probably come up with ideas on your own but here a few simple suggestions:

A voting app, where you can add something to vote on and let people cast votes. A VERY simple version of it is found here (this is OLD, mind you)
A site to keep track of fun quotes. Let you store quotes per kid and group them into families. Let people comment on the quotes. It’s a blog really, but with a twist. I created one when my kids were born (2008) and have been using it ever since.
A blog - it is actually a very nice feature set
A review site where you can review books, movies, or music. Pull in data via API and let people review (add stars and comments)
Steal an idea from a final project.

What is not a good idea for a project during PGP

In short: things that you don’t finish or that stay uncompleted. Typically this is because the scope of the project is too big. Ensure that your the project is sliced in a good way, so that each slice can be deployed when it is finished.

Other things to consider:

Don’t write stuff that you don’t want to show up on your CV. Sure - coding up a game for an NES-emulator is cool, but the number of jobs you’ll get doing that is slim
Don’t use technologies (at work) that you will not work with. Remember that you are actually working for Salt, as a JavaScript Full Stack Developer - your project should have some kind of connection to that.
Projects that keep you busier with content and business logic than learning technology. Maintaining a cryptocurrency trading app will probably see you doing more maintenance than coding, for example. :)

Some other thoughts on your project

The important thing to remember is that WHAT you build is not as important as THAT you build and show it off.

Remember to deploy it and share your code so that potential employers can see it in action. That means that the README should be; present, containing useful information and instructions needed to get it running (if possible).

Keep it tidy and refactored - AND WORKING. The code is most definitely part of your CV - I have got jobs by people finding my repositories on GitHub.

Extra points are for you to blog about your learnings and findings as you go through writing the application. I promise you that it will help you learn even more. The simplest version of this blog is to keep a list of “Things I learned from this project” in the ReadMe of the project.

Other things to work on - if you are out of ideas

Below follows a list of things that is suitable to learn after the

Ask someone at Sales if they have given you a previous test from a client - we have a few that we have kept.
Do something from this list
Do katas. Over and over again - do katas. Remember what a kata is all about - muscle memory for coding
Redo any of the labs from the course - particularly the later labs - remember that all the lectures are recorded
Redo the labs using other technologies.
- Rebuild the React WorldClocks, using Angular, Svelte or Vue for example.
Write a tutorial on something you have learned and host it on your blog
Learn something new, related to the topics in the course
Rebuild a final project that you found interesting or cool - ask the Sales team for examples.
Here are other clone projects to follow along in doing which I found very interesting

Useful resources

Here’s a list of resources that we found useful to learn more about JavaScript development:

If you don’t have it already - build your own site, with a blog and an about page (at least). I cannot tell you how much it changed my career to start a blog. And I did that just to have somewhere to write things down, for myself.
You can build it from scratch or just use some kind of tool
Have the code on GitHub (which allows you to let GitHub host it too)
Host it online and use it to update your progress and findings
Follow a tutorial to learn new technologies and tools. Some of my favorite sites are
Read newsletters and follow podcasts and blogs. If for nothing else this will give you a lot of ideas on what to learn and know. Here are a few examples:
Other practice sites