I’m coming up to starting the fifth week of eight of Founders and Coders, a free Javascript based bootcamp in London. It’s flown by and I’ve learnt so much. So far we have covered AJAX, Jekyll, APIs, MongoDB, Bootstrap 3, Node and npm, SASS/SCSS, and the pace doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

It’s been strange looking back on the projects and techniques we learnt in previous weeks and finding them so much easier to understand and work with. Having a constant source of mentorship from the People Upstairs (known as the freelancers co-op to anyone not actually in our cohort) has helped immeasurably with myriad career and skill based issues, from defeating imposter syndrome to getting our heads around TDD.

I’m looking forward to D3, which will be next week, and I think I’ll start taking more notes about solutions and problems I’ve faced, but for now I think I’ll go over the note taking apps I’ve been using to try and collate my learning.

At the moment I’m using Diigo Outliners for the main bulk. I do actually prefer Workflowy but I’m not paying for a service when a practically identical free version exists. The simple and intuitive controls make taking notes whilst people are explaining things a breeze, and I can easily move things from ‘Things from this week’ to ‘Unresolved Questions’.

Other than that, I use Trello for my life plan, app ideas and more speculative learning, as well dashing out ideas. The UI is pretty inspiring to me, as on my first use I fell in love with how intuitive it was, though there are some odd quirks - you can’t delete boards for instance - that stop it from being perfect.

I love note taking and productivity apps - this isn’t the full suite of things I use - so I’d love to make one at some point, as well as having a few half-formed ideas tucked away in Trello.

Doing this course has opened up so many more possibilities for the future. Random product ideas before were idle dreams, and now I could get good enough at coding to try and make them happen!