Liftoff

Let's start off by taking a look at the liftoff stage. This is an exciting time for new students. During this time students are immersed in learning skills that they've never seen before:

Because all the topics that students learn during this stage are new, their expertise skyrockets. I like to call this the liftoff stage because it's easy to visualize a new student's expertise like a rocket ship soaring into the sky into places it has never been before. During this time, a student will learn how to:

• Configure a development machine
• Learn a programming language
• Work with various frameworks
• Build functional applications

This stage usually lasts for the first 250-300 hours that a developer is learning how to code. This estimate is based on what I've seen with the DevCamp bootcamp students and equals around 6-8 weeks of intensive learning.

As fun as this stage is, it has drawbacks. One of the key problems is that it can give students false confidence. When they see themselves building applications that actually work, it's natural to believe that they can dive right into building production apps for clients. However, they don't realize that they're about to enter… the twilight zone of learning how to code.