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I can’t vouch for other programs, but I co-founded Dev Bootcamp (the first programming bootcamp) and the sequence you outlined is almost verbatim how we brought

I can’t vouch for other programs, but I co-founded Dev Bootcamp (the first programming bootcamp) and the sequence you outlined is almost verbatim how we brought students into Rails. We’d explain it the way you described. We’d have them start with Sinatra apps after 3 weeks of modeling problems in CLI apps. After their 10th hand-written form with error handling, they’d see the value of Rails form helpers immediately once they hit the last few weeks. Similarly, they’d write lots of SQL queries by hand in their CLI apps. We’d push them to separate it behind method boundaries then class boundaries then build a mini-ORM. When ActiveRecord came along it was no problem because they had a model of the problems it was invented to solve. A bit of the flavor: http://bit.ly/dbc_activerecord http://bit.ly/dbc_activerecord It’s always sad to hear that the bootcamps that followed us didn’t try to give students the right mental models, but I believe you!

TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's also good to hear that there are bootcamps who seem to do this right (and, importantly, want to do this right)! So thank you for doing it like this, and thank you for taking time to share it in a reply. I read the whole excerpt you linked, and holy cows if you did not just significantly improve my base opinion about boot camps. The way you introduced AR is exactly the way I would do it, with the same digressions to hammer down things like "AR is ultimately just writing SQL for you", and "AR is ORM, there are many ORMs with different approaches", and "where does a concept live?", and "map is not the territory".
- jfarmer 7y ago
  I can't vouch for other bootcamps! DBC was sold in 2015 to Kaplan and they shut it down in 2017. :( Here's a thread I posted the other day, though, that might be interesting to you: https://twitter.com/jfarmer/status/1127324440469970944 https://twitter.com/jfarmer/status/1127324440469970944 BTW, the evolution of your feelings is pretty normal and it brings back memories. Haha. People would always be like, "Uh, yeah, ok, so you're churning out code monkeys, right?" Then we'd bring them in, show them what we were teaching and how we were teaching it, and they'd go "Oh man, I wish I had been taught like this!"

TeMPOraL 7y ago

It's also good to hear that there are bootcamps who seem to do this right (and, importantly, want to do this right)! So thank you for doing it like this, and thank you for taking time to share it in a reply. I read the whole excerpt you linked, and holy cows if you did not just significantly improve my base opinion about boot camps. The way you introduced AR is exactly the way I would do it, with the same digressions to hammer down things like "AR is ultimately just writing SQL for you", and "AR is ORM, there are many ORMs with different approaches", and "where does a concept live?", and "map is not the territory".

jfarmer 7y ago
I can't vouch for other bootcamps! DBC was sold in 2015 to Kaplan and they shut it down in 2017. :( Here's a thread I posted the other day, though, that might be interesting to you: https://twitter.com/jfarmer/status/1127324440469970944 https://twitter.com/jfarmer/status/1127324440469970944 BTW, the evolution of your feelings is pretty normal and it brings back memories. Haha. People would always be like, "Uh, yeah, ok, so you're churning out code monkeys, right?" Then we'd bring them in, show them what we were teaching and how we were teaching it, and they'd go "Oh man, I wish I had been taught like this!"