I passed every coding challenge at Flatiron School on my first try. Here’s how.

I recently finished studying Software Engineering/Web Development at Flatiron School. For those of you not familiar with the program, it is an intense 15 week coding boot camp. Throughout the time of a student studying the immersive web development program, they will have four coding challenges. Each of these challenges is a 60 to 90 minute evaluation during which a student will be given partial code and will need to complete the code in order to achieve a set of deliverables.

One of these four challenges in on Ruby, one is on using MVC frameworks in Ruby on Rails, one is on vanilla JavaScript, and one is on React. If a student fails a code challenge, they are given one chance at a do over. Below are some of the actions and strategies I took which helped me pass each code challenge on the very first try.

1. Read the read me

These are four words you will hear a lot throughout the program. There is a reason why you hear them so often; because, and this cannot be stressed enough, you need to read a read me, especially during a coding challenge. Do not merely scan the read me, you must read it thoroughly.

Each coding challenge will have a read me, a document which will contain a description of what the test is looking for…