26: Fullstack Academy with David Yang (Part 1: The Bootcamp)

Impostor Syndrome

"Build your life around systems, not around goals"

This is the first of a two part interview with David Yang, the Co-Founder and Lead Instructor of Fullstack Academy. This interview was recorded on the very last day of my bootcamp cohort when everyone on the panel of 8 graduated and moved on to the next phase of their journey into a tech career. This part focuses on looking back to understand how the sausage got made. We talk about a lot of technical choices made during the history of Fullstack - don't feel overwhelmed if we talk about something you haven't come across, but if you wish to follow up I have included relevant links in the show notes. Finally we end this first part of the interview with some advice for students as they graduate into their post-bootcamp life.

Show Topics:

• Fullstack's Origins as MBA Codeschool in 2012
• Entering YCombinator circa 2012 with a "multi-idea application"
• Writing Fullstack's first syllabus (in Ruby on Rails) during his honeymoon!
• The struggle of teaching both Ruby and Javascript
• Iterating towards a Fullstack JS syllabus when everyone else was still teaching Rails
• Technical Advisory from Michael Nutt of Movable Ink and Bryan Helmkamp of Code Climate
• Picking the MEAN stack coined by Val Karpov in 2013
• Switching from Mongo to PostgresQL and from Angular to React
• Fullstack's curriculum and learning software "LearnDot" has been rewritten three times
• How does Fullstack make decisions around the curriculum?
  • Trip Planner as a case study for dealing with MVC
  • The history of frontend frameworks from JQuery to Jeremy Ashkenas' BackboneJS to Dojo Toolkit
  • Choosing tools = making bets
• The MongoDB (NoSQL) vs Postgres (SQL) decision
  • Mongo is good for rapid project iteration but most companies eventually realize they want structure
  • Learning the harder thing (SQL) first and then taking away aspects of it (NoSQL) is better than the other way around
  • The Dominance of Firebase in Senior phase Capstone projects vs the backend curriculum in Junior Phase
• What's important about the difference between Junior Phase and Senior Phase?
  • Think about learning in terms of switchbacks instead of linear progression
  • Senior Phase is about synthesis: the roles of the three major projects of Ecommerce, Stackathon, and Capstone
• Why is it important to have CS Saturday Workshops and CTO lectures? Knowing what you don't know
• Security in the wake of Yahoo and Equifax hacks: Security is like defending a city with no gates.
• The Future of Fullstack
  • Is there a future where we only learn serverless backends instead of traditional VPS backend? Probably not. Not knowing/owning your infrastructure is a high risk proposition
  • If Junior Phase was one week longer - what would you add? Virtual DOM workshop, Redux Saga. More CSS/Design.
• Advice for The Post-Bootcamp Cliff
  • Build your life around systems, not around goals
  • Get your first 10-100 users on any project
  • Coding 2-4 hours a day - don't let your Github go gray
  • Speaking and Networking
  • Paul Graham's essay on Self Indulgence and Life is Short
  • The students that fail are the students that lose touch
  • Don't take the job search too personally (Steve Yegge on the Anti-Loop)

Extra Links

• It's Nice to be MEAN - why we teach Javascript
• Training Software Engineers on Software Engineering Daily in 2015
• Nimit on Breaking Into Startups in 2017
• David Yang on Twitter and LinkedIn

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or any RSS based Podcatcher, or download episodes at impostor-syndrome.org! Send your questions and feedback to @swyx or [e-mail]. If this story reminds you of someone you know, send it to them!