CodePath iOS University Bootcamp | My Experience

5 min readAug 24, 2019

When I first saw the posting for CodePath from my university’s SWE (Society of Women Engineers), I thought it was too good to be true. A free Bootcamp for iOS programming in my school? No way.

A friend of mine who had taken it before said that she had learned a lot through this program and made cool connections. I decided to give it a try, even though I wasn’t a beginner because I thought this would be a good way to refresh my iOS programming and make friends.

What I got in return from CodePath was more than I expected.

Four fully-functional app projects
Strong sense of community (Culture is great!)
Meeting and connecting with cool people

Four Fully Functional App Projects

Within the first six weeks of the Bootcamp, we made 3 fully functional apps. They were popular apps and we learned so much about ViewControllers, parsing, Subviews, Heroku database, AutoLayout, and much more.

Afterward, in the next six weeks, we planned, designed and developed our own app within groups of 2–4.

The apps that we made were guided by step-by-step YouTube videos that CodePath members made. It was simple to follow and you learned a lot while doing these apps.

Here are the four projects are taken from CodePath:

Flix:

A read-only movie browsing app similar to Rotten Tomatoes

Twitter Client:

A read-write twitter client that allows users to view and compose tweets using the Twitter API

Instagram:

A read-write Instagram-style app built from the ground up using a custom configured backend

The last app was designed and developed in groups. For my group, we made a fitness Instagram-like app to encourage movement among friends.

We used Adobe XD to make our designs and prototypes:

We also took our icons from flaticon.com

GitHub link to the project here.

It’s also safe to say that my GitHub Repo was poppin’ this year because of CodePath.

Strong Sense of Community and Immediate Help (Less than 1 hour)

Our San Jose State University iOS CodePath Bootcamp course met every Friday for around 12 weeks at 4 pm. Each week, the instructors would go over labs and new concepts in iOS programming. We were also given time to work on our coding and, overall, it was an encouraging and relaxed environment.

The instructors made it clear that they were there to help and to not waste any time stuck for hours on problems that someone can help you within 5 minutes. They were also very encouraging in you asking questions which helped create a growth-mindset for all the students.

The CodePath team provided their own Stack Overflow-like Discussion website where students can post questions and, within an hour, instructors and mentors would be there to help and answer.

Overall, I felt comfortable and free to ask questions in the bootcamp and discussions. Also, it was a nice feeling to have someone immediately help you with a problem rather than mindlessly struggling for hours.

In the past I had some iOS dev (outside of CodePath) tell me that you shouldn’t ask questions and should suffer the pain because you learn the lesson better that way, I completely disagree. When I didn’t ask for help, I felt isolated, lost and hopeless. When I did ask for help during the Bootcamp, it was responded with support to with support and encouragement

I also got encouragement from my Senior Project group

(Pictured below, not associated with CodePath, but I wanted to give a shoutout to them and we built a pretty cool iOS app!)

Though you’ll learn both ways, the way you felt learning it was important. When I was working with the previous developer, it was hard to communicate, programming wasn’t fun anymore and felt like quitting.

When I was in CodePath, I felt happy and supported by the instructors and my peers. I actually enjoyed coding again and picked up iOS programming again. Pain isn’t always necessary for growth.

Meeting and Connecting with Cool People

I met the most amazing people in CodePath! I made life-long friends whom I could reach out to whenever. The instructors were also very encouraging and helpful, I could direct message them whenever I needed help. I recently launched an app on the App Store and told them about it. One of my peers from CodePath launched a few apps on the App Store already so he helped me out with some advice and encouragement.

We also had an amazing demo day and it was cool to see everyone’s hard work pay off at the end!