29: Capstone Checkin: Ranjeet Sodhi

Impostor Syndrome

"Even developers who are even remotely curious about a bootcamp should do it"

I sat down with Ranjeet on the last day of the bootcamp to recap his Capstone site PointBreak. Not everything at a bootcamp always goes well so we do get into a little bit of a tirade about the problems with group work but please know that we both came out of it with very good experiences regardless. One thing I am seeing with Ranjeet is he has learned to become more humble as he goes through the bootcamp and you will really hear that in this interview. At the same time, I think that humility is what is enabling him to learn new skills while his peers are still stuck in their old jobs. I also give my own perspective on humility in this interview.

I've made sure to include the PointBreak demo video and other useful links in the show notes, so be sure to check them out. But for now, I'm excited to bring you Round 3 with Ranjeet!

An extreme sports website with a social and fitness focus. Members can join or follow events they like, discuss relevant topics with other members who are also following the same events, create new events they are coordinating, and get suggestions for compatible users based on similar preferences & fitness levels.

Show Notes

• Remind us of your background? CS Degree, Security startup => blockchain (Ranjeet's Midpoint Checkin here)

• Take us through your Capstone. What is Point Break? A travel website with a twist! Also a compromise.

• (Some bellyaching about working in a team, please excuse us)

• What was the stack behind Point Break? React, Redux, Sequelize, Sockets, D3, Passport, Weather Underground, Yelp, Fitbit Integration. Tried and failed to isolate news feed for extreme sports.

• "Now all of us are extremely comfortable with this stack."

• "I love Redux a lot more." (Ranjeet was on the React Redux roundtable episode)

• A theme I am investigating this round is how many teams dropped Redux+Node+Express+SQL for Firebase. What were the challenges in learning a totally new backend, and what were the tradeoffs you discovered? We didn't think about it, didn't know about Firebase's messaging.

• Thinking back to other team presentations on demo day, which of them stood out and why? Grace Hopper and Chicago and Remote blew my mind. First was DataVR which visualized cryptocurrencies in VR. Getaway, an airline pricing app with amazing D3 visualization.

• Taking a look back at Senior Phase as a whole, what have you learned about yourself that you didn’t know before? I thought I was able to work with people quite easily, realized I am a little obstinate. For the first week we were just debating what we were going to do. Solidified my understanding of the stack.

• Turning to the Job Hunt: What is Career Prep at Fullstack like? Caters toward more junior candidates. For people with more work experience - its more of a discussion to start a potential conversation and networking. Also got a hit on his StackOverflow profile after the career success people told him to do it. Career hack!

• Any recent updates on your professional ambitions? yes, I want to be in development, not just bizdev. Humbled, need to do more learning before leading a large team of developers. Started learning Solidity yesterday.

• What other languages/libraries/frameworks are you interested in learning post bootcamp? Solidity.

• Advice for bootcamp students like Ranjeet who are ex developers? "If you are remotely curious about a bootcamp, you should do it". The experience made me feel young again!

• What are you thinking of building right now? Improving upon his stackathon cryptocurrency app, CoinTracker for personal use.

Links:

• Pointbreak on Github, Youtube, old demo
• DataVR and Getaway
• Ranjeet on Linkedin and Github

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