#makers academy

[imjustab0y-blog]

The plunge into Makers Academy + Personal Goals

As I was going through Flatiron’s Learn.co coding program while rekindling the flame with coding, I was thoroughly impressed by how they outlined it and how even though it feels like you didn’t take in much information, the reality is that its hands on approach which got you working with code and making it work whilst only giving you a gentle nudge in the right direction was very satisfying. I’d seriously considered enrolling into their online program but their career assistance was only guaranteed if you were an American citizen - which unfortunately, I’m not. Though its program and its on-site program are critically acclaimed, personally, it had less value if they were taking that into account for the tuition they were charging.

This got me looking into other bootcamps all based within Europe, and eventually I settled for taking the plunge and going with Makers Academy based in London. They weren’t actually my first choice initially, but I wanted to make sure I did my due diligence - reading blogs of alumni/current students from various bootcamps, past reviews (especially the negative ones) and what they were coming out of those camps making.

After taking into account all of the information I had on hand, I decided it’s now or never - continue living my comfortable but hilariously boring life or spruce it up a little with a bit of adventure? That phrase rung again in my head: “YOU COULD DIE AT ANY FUCKING SECOND”... so I booked myself to take the application test for about a week and a half after I hit the apply button. Shortly after, I was given a pretty thorough outline about what the course was about, the application process and what I’d need to do to ensure I’d do well enough to pass.

Off to Ruby on codeacademy and Chris Pine’s Learn to Program I went. Some nights I’d get only 10-20 minutes done, other nights a couple of hours - but the importance was consistency and making sure at least something every day was done - thankfully a habit I retained while studying languages. The last three nights before the test, I made the awful mistake of buying Stardew Valley and sinking far too many hours into it - but I made sure to do a short refresher of everything I’d done before and then awaited my call for the interview on the day I booked it for.

After a few teething issues with Skype and having to get set up with ScreenHero instead, on went the application process. As we ran a couple of minutes late, we had a brief chat, then played a quick logic game before going straight on into the coding. Out of respect for Makers, I won’t reveal anything but if you go over the material they tell you to (and I mean actually do it and not just skim over it a night or two before) and have a decent stab at some basic Ruby code yourself, you’ll be totally fine. Get used to explaining your thought process - something I thankfully had inadvertedly practiced with my veteran coder pals whenever they were peeping over my issues.

My interviewer then told me that they’d meet up with the team and then call me back on Friday. I’m not sure what happened as I was bricking it the entire day out of sheer fear that I’d failed since I never got a call (fuck, it was easy - but was it easy to the point where I fucked up that much??) - but then I received an e-mail in the evening saying I wasn’t reachable by phone and that I’d passed. Fistpump.

After taking a day or two to let off some steam from the stress of it all (aka playing way too much more of Stardew Valley), it’s time to get back into the coding foray and keep myself sharp. I signed up for the February ‘18 cohort and signed the appropriate agreements and put down my deposit, meaning my pre-course starts in about 6ish weeks.

Will I love it, or will I regret it?

Fuck it, who knows. I’m strapped in and I’ve always been a sucker for chaos, so I might as well make the most of it.

Since I feel like I’ve already waffled on for way too long, a short list of goals for this week:

Finish the Learning to Program book (currently on chapter 8, there’s 14 chapters) with exercises done before my flight to London on Friday night. Don’t think it should be an issue as long as I put in the time.

Figure out what direction I want to take coding wise when I’m done with the book (maybe look into more Ruby, JavaScript, Rails, even something like C# - who knows)

Maintain my Devember pledge with my pal

Getting more comfortable playing Tekken on pad - I’m primarily an arcade stick player, so it’s gonna take some adjusting since I don’t expect to bring it over for my time in London.

Actually go back to the gym. I enjoy it - why do I seek to not go out of my way to do things I enjoy? aaaaaaaaaa

[infoagence-blog]

Obinna Ukwuani

Obinna Ukwuani, entrepreneur social nigérian, diplômé du MIT, né en 1991 à Washington, est le fondateur de Makers Academy. Lire la suite : Obinna Ukwuani

[infoagence-blog]

Obinna Ukwuani

Obinna Ukwuani, entrepreneur social nigérian, diplômé du MIT, né en 1991 à Washington, est le fondateur de Makers Academy. Lire la suite : Obinna Ukwuani

[logic-based-creativity]

Time to get started on the pre-course for Makers Academy! Since I have a Windows laptop at the moment, I’ve signed up to Cloud9 for my coding needs. Used to use Nitrous and loved it, but they’ve now put up some silly rules in their freemium model and I just don’t use it enough to pay. Yet. Anyway, cloud9 is treating me great so far! Highly recommended.

[codeene-blog]

Lessons from a Craftathon

On Friday 4 September, my colleague Ella and I were invited to take part in a Craftathon at Makers Academy, where we had both trained to become web developers. 

A Craftathon is similar to a Hackathon, in so much as you have a brief and need to work quickly as a team over a short period of time to create an answer to said brief. What makes it ‘craft’, rather than ‘hack’ is that you need to have written quality code that has been tested. In Hackathon’s, it does not matter what it looks like under the hood, just that it answers the brief. A Craftathon should give you a minimal viable product, however that product should contain clean code and be bug free.

A cohort of Makers Academy students had recently graduated, so the Craftathon provided them with the perfect opportunity to improve on the skills they had learned over the past 12 weeks, in a more practical environment. 

Four teams of five alumni were given a brief (in the format of a cucumber test) to create a website that will allow people to book trips to the moon. A back end to the site would let the administrators see how many tickets have been booked. 

Ella and I were involved as Product Owners, along with Mark from FNZ, a Financial Tech company that have recruited Makers Academy graduates previously. 

The Craftathon made me think a lot about my processes when coding, either for work or pleasure. There were three points that I took with me from the day: 

Do what needs to be done

Where do you start when starting a new project? This is one of the trickiest things to decide upon when you have finished wire framing. The Craftathon reminded me that the best place to start is with what is most important to your app. 

What made me realise this was that the team I was working with decided to start by creating the log in for the administrative back end of the website. This, you could argue, would make common linear sense, as to log in would be the first thing you would be required to do as an administrator. However, with minimal time, as a Product Owner, I was not interested in the team developing a log in for me, I wanted to see how many tickets to the moon had been sold. I advised the team this should be the first thing they do. 

In a recent app I am developing as a side project, I changed my plan for the next model I was going to add, using this same reasoning. 

Create your code ‘properly’

By the end of the day, I was impressed with how all of the teams had created workable apps with some marvellous css in less than 6 hours. A couple of apps, however, crashed when they were demoed. It happens, particularly in the fast paced world of a Hackathon. This, however, was a Craftathon. 

As one judge pointed out ‘even if you had just created an app that takes a booking from a customer and displays it to the product owner, that is fully tested and working, you would be ahead of the game. Hacking is great fun, and it is always better to get good working code quickly than labour over perfect code (this is what refactoring is for), however using the correct processes (what I mean by ‘properly’) to create robust code will make your life easier as your app develops. 

Even if it is just for fun, there’s nothing wrong with getting into good habits, such as unit and feature testing and committing to GitHub regularly.     

Listen

Whether you are working on a project for yourself or someone else, it is always important to listen and understand what is required, so you can ensure that you can create in as simple fashion as possible. 

When working on your own, this could be considered planning, however by listening to yourself or someone you are working for will always create questions and these questions will help solidify your understanding of what is actually required to make a project a success.

The Craftathon was a lot of fun, and I would like to thank Makers Academy for taking part. It was nice to catch up with everyone there again. Below are some more pictures from the day...

Ella and I with our serious Product Owner faces on

Ella helping the Craftathon participants relax

Craftathon participants present to the judges

[tomcoakes]

Eleventh Week at Makers Academy - Graduation!

We did it. Eleven weeks of coding (fifteen if you want to count the pre-course) and I’m now in the position where I can work collaboratively on a relatively large project with many moving parts. Software development is weird. I love it.

At the end of Friday we presented our completed project to our peers plus a whole bunch of faces I didn’t recognise - and it went really well! I’m usually not too phased by public speaking, but for some unexplained reason (and despite the fact that the stakes were pretty low) I managed to work myself up into a nervous stupor in the build up to the graduation event. Other than missing a small cue (sorry again Carrie!), it all went smoothly and came across as a pretty slick and professional presentation.

Our final app is a difficult one to demonstrate, but can be found here if you’re interested. There are two sides to the app: the publicly accessible side for teenage girls attending STEMettes events from their mobile is one of them, but there’s also a whole backend admin portal for the staff to read and edit all of the information that gets entered into the database. For some of this functionality we were lucky enough to stumble across Ruby gems (we built our app on Rails) that were well-crafted solutions for certain features that would have taken us forever to build ourselves. Perhaps there’s something to be said for building that stuff yourself from scratch, but if it already exists you may as well make use of it, right?

Without going into too much detail, my team worked brilliantly together - all playing to our strengths and sharing tasks collaboratively using waffle.io as a Kanban board. There were four of us, so working in pairs was the obvious thing to do for the most part, but when we were tackling particularly difficult bits we’d power through it as a four in order to solve stuff quickly.

So that’s the core part of Makers Academy over. No more official lectures, projects or challenges. Until last week I was really sad about that fact, but now I think I’m glad it’s over. I’ve loved every bit of it, but three months of such intensity is absolutely knackering - I don’t think I could do any more. I know that this was the right decision, but the proof will be in the next few months. Whether I manage to get a job before I run out of money will ultimately come down to my own work ethic, and after spending so long in what feels like a very safe environment, it might take a little time for that self-motivation to return to its pre-makers level.

Next week is employment week. It’s notoriously challenging (although this is only the second iteration of it), but that’s good because there’s so much to be done. Having already had a lot of exposure to IT recruitment, I have a fairly good idea what to expect and hopefully some of the contacts I’ve made in a previous life may come in handy but ultimately I’m going to be made or broken off the back of my GitHub profile and my ability to complete a tech test. Best get busy.

[tomcoakes]

Tenth Week at Makers Academy - Final Projects!

Before starting at Makers, I’d attended two of their “graduation” events. I use inverted commas because it’s really only a graduation by name - there’s no qualification or formal ceremony at the end of it, and more than anything is an excuse to celebrate the end of the course whilst showcasing your work to your colleagues. On these two occasions it was a strange feeling watching the teams proudly (and somewhat awkwardly) present the projects that they’d spent the last two weeks slaving over. I knew that I’d reach this point myself at some stage in the future but at the same time couldn’t really imagine the path to get there.

Well I’m here now, already one week in to the two week project that will hopefully act as my most substantial example of coding on my GitHub profile. The project I’m working on is an interesting one - I’m on the only team that chose to work with a charity, which comes with a few pros and cons. It’s definitely great to be able to work on something that feels genuinely useful and has the potential to be in the wild as a real world product, but that does raise the stakes a bit and added pressure isn’t what I’m necessarily looking for.

Our client, STEMettes, works to encourage schoolgirls to enter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) industries by holding events and workshops. The app idea that they pitched to us involves gamifying the attendance of these events with points and prizes. Problems arose on Tuesday morning when we had difficulties getting in touch with the charity to talk through their idea in more detail and acquire something that resembled a brief - so we took the initiative to just mockup and wireframe what we THOUGHT they wanted in the meantime.

On Wednesday we were able to have a proper meeting, and although it required a bit of a change in direction, we hadn’t been too far off after all. Unlike with some previous projects that I’ve worked on during my time at Makers, it definitely felt like we were doing this one ‘properly’. Working in a really agile manner, using continuous integration to manage deployment from the very start of the project, and carefully managing our Git branches for working on new features or bug fixes. Very satisfying.

We’ve unfortunately had to make some sacrifices in terms of the features that are going to make it into our MVP, but it’s for the best since we’d rather have a smaller, stabler product at the end of the two weeks as opposed to a buggy mess that can do more than it needs to - especially since we’re working for a client.

[tomcoakes]

Ninth Week at Makers Academy

Oh shit, it’s nearly over isn’t it. Week nine marked the final full week of ‘learning’ a prescribed topic, because what follows will be a two-week long final project and a week dedicated to employment. Speaking to others on the cohort, there are mixed feelings about this three-month journey coming to an end. I’m firmly in the ‘please don’t let this end’ camp. I feel like there’s still so much to learn and I’m apprehensive about doing so with the training wheels off. That said, I’m also very excited about getting a job and continuing to learn.

We were learning about Rails this week, which was a bit of a shock to the system after spending so much time in JavaScript mode. Rails is cool though, I like it, despite the fact that at times it makes you feel like a chimp just pressing buttons. So many things that I’d learned to do myself when using Sinatra and Datamapper are just taken care of by Rails, so I can see how it would easy to take it for granted and rely on it to do all of the legwork for you.

Again, it’s such a large framework that it doesn’t feel incredibly useful to spend only a week on it but I’m no longer concerned by that feeling. Whether I end up using it in our final project, or end up with a job as a Ruby on Rails developer - I’ll begin learning it for real when there’s a practical need to do so.

This long Easter weekend’s challenge is to build a clone of Instagram (no pressure). Although it sounds like a huge job, I can see in my head that Rails is going to automate a lot of the work for me.

I may try to blog daily next week, as I work on my biggest project so far. I won’t know what it is until Monday but I’m confident that I’ll enjoy it.