"Part of our job is to pinpoint these people and make sure they're getting the positive feedback they need"

I caught up with Eli at the end of her term as a Junior Fellow at Full Stack. This interview has two parts: first we recap her Capstone, which is a desktop drag and drop developer tool called Synq, and then we cover her experiences as a Fellow and how she's grown since we first met her on Episode 11. We talk about some misconceptions that we have had about the Fellowship and how a past career in recruiting actually prepares you well for a lot of the interpersonal skills needed to do well through the bootcamp.

• See Eli's past Checkins here.

• Take us through your Capstone. What is Synq? An Electron desktop app that helps developers visually create models and seed files for Sequelize. (We previously interviewed David Ko who was also on the Synq team)

• Riskiest Technical Challenge? Electron.js, React-Drag-n-Drop took a whole week to set up, and was buggy for a long while!

• There were quite a few new items in the stack that were not taught during junior phase. What’s the story behind these decisions? Deciding on a developer tool, deciding on at least using one new technology but idea coming from an instructor

• The stress of Demo Day, being live on Facebook!

• Having a background in HR/Recruiting helps with improv and interpersonal skills

• Taking a look back at Senior Phase as a whole, what have you learned about yourself that you didn’t know before? Not burning out, Working as a team. Deciding on an architecture ahead of time and then sticking to that for the next 2 weeks and building things in parallel as a team. Favorite moment: Planning the big picture out on a whiteboard

• Interviewing process to be a Fellow: Answering questions about teaching style on the application

• Most important elements of a teacher: Patience, Empathy, Knowledge

• Addressing My Misperceptions of Fellows :)

• Giving Admissions Interviews: Many people can't do loops or get stuck trying to do basic debugging. Have at least 1 month of JS experience or Bootcamp Prep before applying.

• Fellowing for her Learning Team: Holding office hours for weaker students, people who think they're not doing as well as they should.

• Being Teaching Assistants: helping instructors tweak the curriculum.

• Advice to students: Don't have to finish the workshop, but READ THE INSTRUCTIONS.

• What are you thinking of building right now? Worked on a Game with other Fellows (Super Asteroid Battle), React Native Mobile App with Image Recognition

• Tweaking the Curriculum: Should Fullstack teach React Native? If I open sourced the bootcamp, could you have learned this on your own?

• Networking with Fullstack Alumni and leaning on Personal Networks

Links:

• Check out Eli's appearance on Course Report talking about All Female Bootcamps!
• SynQ on Github and Youtube
• Eli on Twitter, Github, 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 [email protected]. If this story reminds you of someone you know, send it to them!