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. But it’s also a trap
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. Have you taken this bootcamp
You can get comfortable. You can start to believe that coding is a linear, cell-by-cell, no-consequences activity. Then you try to write your first standalone .py script—a simple blackjack game or a Tic-Tac-Toe AI—and suddenly, nothing works. Functions don’t share variables. The flow is broken. That moment is heroic
That frustration? That’s the tuition. Looking back, the course follows a predictable, almost mythic emotional arc:
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 .