Bootcamp Babies Beyond CRUD

bootcamp_babies.md

###Bio Eris is a native Texan, a US Army Veteran, and a mom to two brilliant teenage boys. She found a love of programming while working as a technology recruiter in Nashville. She then decided to turn her hobby into a new career and attended Nashville Software School where she learned full-stack development with Ruby, Rails, Javascript, and Angular. Erin is now working as a Web Application Developer for Reax in Nashville.

###Abstract Software Bootcamp graduates (and other Junior Programmers) are entering the technology market with a brief understanding of CRUD actions and web development in general. After a whirlwind of learning in school, graduates are often left asking: what do I learn next?

My first professional project was to create a microservices app from scratch. Previously, I had made extremely simple apps with only a few models, a couple of controllers, and some basic CRUD actions. Oh, and static web pages. I made plently of those.

This talk covers some of the key technical concepts encountered when first going beyond a basic crud app:

• State Machines

• Session Variables

• Decorators

• Database Normalization

This talk will also discuss some of the soft skills that are necessary to participate on a software development team, including:

• Code Reviews

• User Stories

• Pair Programming

Bootcamps are a clear line from civilian to Junior Programmer. Less clear is the line from Junior to Mid-level. Armed with basic CRUD and MVC knowledge, Junior Programmers can begin to dive into other programming concepts. Programmers are also expected to participate in collaborative development on projects that require soft skills in addition to technical skills.

from jake... In the first sentence, I’d add two more ‘a’s to maintain parallel structure:
“I’m ​_a_​ native Texan, ​_a_​ US Army Veteran, and ​_a_​ mom (or you could say, ‘and I’m “mom” to two…’)”
Third sentence - “know” should be now

Abstract section

• change “uprising of” to “influx of”, “rise in”, or “wave of new”
• change “me being one of them” to “myself included”
• combine sentences 2 and 3 and switch ’we’ to ’they’ “...understanding of the web, but ​_they_​ are still very…”
• Change “Straight out of” to “Immediately out of”

Maybe modify the conclusion/last paragraph to flow a little more. This isn’t great, but something like:

“As software bootcamps continue to spring up across the country, we developers need to make a conscious effort to bring new graduates into the work force and to help them become confident, productive collaborators. My talk will detail my experience as a bootcamp grad assimilating into the work force, and it will suggest ways that you can also make the transition or help new team members make the transition.

I'm not sure who your target audience is.

The first paragraph or your abstract sounds like it's for the people from more "traditional" routes and you will be telling them about your journey and how effective people from the bootcamp background can be.

The remainder reads like you'll be explaining concepts you've learned since graduating and so your audience is other bootcampers either still studying or early in their career.

This seems like a bit of a mixed bag of technologies. Maybe the abstract could do with some kind of backbone or structure - maybe you could describe some simple app that where the implementation is improved by adding these. Then you could say 'I'll show how adding these technologies to a simple app makes development easier'.

You should standardise on either 'CRUD' or 'crud', but not both.

This seems quite scattered to me. Why not try to pick 2 or 3 things that belong together and just focus on those - for example you mention Decorators so why not a design patterns talk for developers who are new to that topic? I'd also recommend removing the bullet points; a talk abstract is usually just words (look at the talk descriptions from last year's event when preparing to submit to a conference to get an idea of the expected format)