Phil Choi (creator) offers practical advice for people who have completed a coding bootcamp: first do a candid self-assessment (why you started; entrepreneur-minded vs engineer-minded) to choose goals, then focus on networking and finishing small projects that match your interests. He emphasizes breaking projects into small tasks, using team workflows (Trello/Kanban/Jira/GitHub issues), learning concrete technical skills (authentication, UI/UX, HTTP requests, sockets, backend/frontend, QA), and leveraging finished projects in resumes and job conversations. The video also encourages persistence, peer collaboration, and community participation (meetups, Discord).
Chapters
You just finished Bootcamp. Coding feels right. You feel useful now. What. What are you going to do next? Well, there's a lot of things to do next. I think you really have to look at yourself and you have to wonder, why did you start Bootcamp? Were you sitting around with your friends drinking a beer, and you guys are thinking about making an app and you were like, okay, I'm like the one that can make that app. And so I would feel like that you were very business minded when you started. Or maybe you love playing computer games and you love figuring things out. You and you're like, okay, this could be a really good fit. And I feel like that's more of like a engineering developer mind and you want to help out on a team. And so I feel like there's two types of people that go to Bootcamp. There's the entrepreneur type, the more business type, and there's more engineer type, which I feel like you can also be in the middle of. Of both. But just saying that there are end goals that are different for each individual. If you find some value in this video, please leave a question or a comment. It'll greatly help the algorithm and help other people find this video too, to help on both sides. It's definitely like networking with your classmates, networking with your instructor's friends, going to coding meetups. There's a great app called Meetup. Type in coding in the search bar. It's good to just have a coffee with these people. Usually the best way to build up that resume after boot camp is doing personal projects or doing group projects. Before you even start on a project, you have to start asking yourself the right questions. There's like, very broad questions, right? Like, what projects should I start? What do I do after Bootcamp? More importantly, it's more about what am I interested in. Like back to the question, am I more developer minded or am I more entrepreneur minded? Do I want to get the end goal or do I want to optimize? And those are very important questions to ask yourself. The reason why I'm asking this is because not just what you're interested in, like, as in like computer, like technology, like sockets or HTTP requests or. Or things of that nature, but just more like general things, like, are you more interested in music? Do you like going to the gym? Do you want to make like an app helping personal trainers and schedule their things and then. Or do you like dogs? I guess you can make an app like, that can help, like, people match people that have dogs and that need to like, walk dogs. Or something like that. If you find something you're interested in, you can start a project and you can finish the project. And those are the most important things when you start a project and you can show that you finish a project, cool project that these other people want to do that involve maybe with some real estate or blockchain. And in the end you're not going to stick it out unless you're interested in the actual app. And that goes with the job too. So it's like you want to go in and figure out what you're interested in, do that project from start to end. And as you do that, you're going to learn so many things. You're going to learn how to set up a Trello or Kanban board, Jira or whatever you want to use. I think there's GitHub issues now too. You're going to be able to take a project as an idea. One sentence idea, two sentence idea. Oh, I want to make an app that's matching dog owners to dog walkers. Okay, what do I need to do? I need to make authentication. I need to make the UI for the authentication login. What am I going to use for authentication? Email and password or phone number and password. Okay, what is the home screen I have on it? Is it going to be a navigation place? And you kind of have to break down that whole project and then make it into small, small projects to see how people can help you, to see where you can contribute. That's very important because then you can kind of see how a team environment works in a team. And then if you guys, if maybe you gather one or two or three other people that can push you to finish the project, you'll make requests to the back end. You'll need to do the back end, you'll do the front end, you'll need to do the user interface, you'll need to do the user experience. You'll figure out, okay, I'm using this app during QA process quality assurance. Oh, this feels a little bit uncomfortable. Then you'll go back and figure out that you need to change this to the UI ux. And these are all learning experiences through just finishing a project. Okay, HTTP requests make sense here. Okay, this is a chat room. Maybe sockets make sense here. Figure out how to use it. And because you need to make it work, you're going to look up things on the Internet like Google documentation and figure out how to use it. Look up stack overflow, get up forms, and you can find other people that are working on the same kind of problem. Once you get to know them, you can answer a couple of those questions. And basically the right question is what can I start and then finish? That's pretty important. And asking the right questions. Why did I start coding boot camp? What kind of things am I interested in? What kind of apps do I want to build? Once you can answer those kind of things, okay. You'll have a more clear goal and more clear road or path of okay, what do I do now? Now I can work on this project. I can finish it, I can use it on my resume. Okay, this company that I'm interested in at working, I can say I did this project. I know how to do this authentication system, I know how to implement this chat that uses uploads five images at a time. There's no loading time. If you finish that project and then you go to that company and you say, hey, I did this project that's very similar to your app or that could be a good add on to your app and you can kind of getting the job is more like it's not just about showing your skills, it's about showing that you're a good communicator, showing that you have innovative ideas. Basically. What do you do after boot camp? Think about what you want and think about what you feel good about doing and think about your interests. Programming Right after you get our bootcamp, it's going to be interesting. It's the coding is going to be interesting. It's definitely true. And if it's not, then it's not for you, but the interest goes away after a while and then that hard work, that patience, that diligence is going to pull you through and then it's going to get exciting again. In the Discord community, we have a bunch of people right now and I'm hoping we can have more people joining post small projects and maybe you could find those two, three, four people that you can finish a small project with and maybe I can help out on those too. If you need my help, just remember if I can do it, you can do it too. Coding saves lives.
