> 2021-10-12

Coding bootcamps seem to focus heavily on the coding aspect of development work. While teaching coding is important, I think bootcamps could differentiate themselves significantly by focusing on developing team-based skills and experience.

For example they could:

• provide students with guidance on how to receive and conduct pull request reviews
• go over designing and maintaining robust CI/CD pipelines
• instill best-practices for writing unit and integration tests
• participate in tasking stories and organizing development sprints

And this could potentially be done within the scope of a pre-existing open source project.

In this paradigm:

• maintainers would lead the students who would operate as contributors
• code specifics would primarily be offloaded onto students in a self-taught manner
• “gotchas” resources could be provided to help understand language and project specifics

This would provide a real-world and hands-on approach to interacting with a team and a codebase rather than in a classroom-style setting. Effectively they would be “learning on the job” while the project benefits from open source contributions.

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