The Boost Boot Camp is the official boot camp for the Special-Man Global Solution (SGS) internship program. In the program, I was introduced to key concepts and techniques in Backend Engineering (the track I selected) and was consistently evaluated on the knowledge acquired. Each week, my colleagues and I meet with the career track instructor: Mr. Olaoluwa, virtually and he explains the concepts to be taught for that week, answers questions and gives us tasks. The boot camp was entirely virtual and lasted for four (4) weeks.

I found out about SGS boot camp through a career-growth platform that I am a part of. And I applied for it for a couple of reasons: to solidify some of the knowledge that I had gotten through personal study and make sure I was on the right track, to implement the knowledge acquired in real-life tasks to solve problems, to network with, meet and collaborate with new people, and lastly, to increase my chances of building a good portfolio and possibly securing an internship position after the boot camp or even a junior role. Overall, I expect to be well-grounded in the key concepts in my stack and ready to solve real-world problems on my own.

The experience so far has been great, and many of the expectations I had for joining the program are largely being met. The program started on the 22nd of February, 2023 and would be concluded by the 21st of March, when our final assignment will close for submission. All through these 4 weeks, I have been able to refresh my memory about the very fundamental things in Backend Engineering with NodeJS, learn new things, and get to put the knowledge to work. The key concepts that were covered through the boot camp include: Working with Express JS, REST APIs, API Documentation, Writing Good Codes, Understanding Databases, Building Databases and Integrating with a backend app, Deploying a backend project, Authorization and Authentication, and Testing. The materials provided were really relevant and the discussions that ensued many times with my colleagues were also usually very enlightening. One of the projects we built is an Event Management API that allows users to create events and manage attendees for their respective events. You can find the link to the repo that contains my submission here.

I have learned to work more with people and train myself better on how to share information and knowledge that I have, in ways that would be very useful for the people who don't have them. I have been able to identify the parts that I need to get better at, the technologies to learn while moving forward and the kinds of projects that I can build to implement those techs. I do hope to be able to get an internship or junior role offer from SGS after this boot camp. And if not, I hope to be able to secure a position in similar roles at other corporations.

Sincere appreciation to the management of SGS and the training team for this boot camp. It really helped me, and I am sure it must be the same for my colleagues as well.