But I could sit down with a blank script and build something. A password generator. A web scraper for my favorite blog. A text-based RPG. More importantly, I could read other people’s code and understand what it was trying to do, even if I didn't know how .
But you will become a hero in a different, more important sense. But I could sit down with a blank script and build something
That frustration? That’s the tuition. Looking back, the course follows a predictable, almost mythic emotional arc: A text-based RPG
But it’s also a trap.
And honestly? That’s a much better deal. Have you taken this bootcamp? Did you finish, or did you get stuck in the OOP desert? Share your story below. That frustration
That moment is heroic. And this course gives you dozens of those moments. Portillo’s course heavily uses Jupyter Notebooks for the early sections. This is a brilliant pedagogical move. Notebooks allow you to write tiny chunks of code, see the output immediately, and interleave explanations with execution. It feels like magic.
Here is the deep, unvarnished truth about that journey. Let’s address the elephant in the room. The course says "2020." In tech, that might as well be a decade. You won’t learn the latest match statement (Python 3.10) or the newest async/await patterns. The projects don't use AI pair programming, and the environment setup feels… vintage.
