Progress Tracking & Recommendations

We are almost at the end of the introduction to Backend part of the track. This provides you with a good foundation of what you should know by end of your first week.

As you will now begin working on your first project, you may wonder How do I know if I am on track?.

🚩 How do I know if I am on track?

Below you will find a week-by-week timeline of track projects, practicals and katas you will encounter during the BE module. This is to help you understand what are the time and effort expectations. We encourage you to refer back to this as often as you need throughout the module.

And some clarifications:

1. The filled background boxes represent the planned duration we have accounted for that project and we hope you will, ideally, start by and finish that project.
2. Wherever there is an overlap, that means that you may work on these projects in parallel.
3. Wherever there is a transparent dotted line buffer, that means we think it should be fine if you either start early or finish later than the period we accounted for, if your own circumstances make it challenging to complete tasks in the scheduled time.
4. The Book Library is an optional challenge meant as an extra credit for those of you who want to practice once again what you've learned but with less guidance. There is no expectation you actually start or finish it.

🥇 Our Recommendations

From our experience, the students who do the following things are the most successful during the BE module (and after):

1. Use the first 1-2 weeks to adjust and lay the foundation for what's to come by immersing themselves into the new concepts. These weeks are more laid back and represent the foundation on top of which to build later on.
2. Put in the recommended extra hours outside of lectures to research content (articles, videos, other courses), practice what's taught during lectures and consistently work through the track content.
3. Use the track as a complementary tool to the taught lectures. While you should be able to navigate it independently, it isn't meant to completely substitute the theory.
4. Frequently contribute during lectures (by checking and preparing questions beforehand) and in Slack by asking questions, showing progress, raising blockers and/or supporting others.
5. Leverage the fact that everyone else in their cohort is going through the same journey of learning (albeit at different speeds), and lean into each other to get help, pair program, share content and get through this course. Some students are very active on social media, some blog, while some others are very active within their group.
6. Consider the projects they work on as potential items to add and build their portfolio to showcase to recruiters and employers.

Hopefully you will find the above valuable, and with that...

🗻 Our first BE challenge

Onward towards a familiar project... ▶️