Today was my first day on the main course at Makers Academy, London.
What a day… I absolutely loved it.
To begin, I arrived outside of Zetland House, Shoreditch around 09:30 this morning. This is now the new home of Makers Academy.
I didn’t know what to expect and I was very nervous to go in. There were a lot of new and unfamiliar faces walking in and out of the building… all were very happy, pleasant & polite. Lots of “Good Mornings!” filled the space around me. This was the first of many welcoming features that I experienced throughout the day.
After some time waiting outside, I entered the building and signed myself in at the reception where I was directed to Maker’s new offices.
As I walked into the offices I met one of my cohort peers by the name of Ryan who I recognised from our pre-course slack channel. Immediately I felt a lot safer and more relaxed because I now had someone that I could talk to and follow until I knew more about where to go and what to do.
Shortly after meeting Ryan, I began to see more and more of my peers from the pre-course.
I found James from my course and who I paired up with over Slack during the pre-course. He was sat down in the student area with his laptop out and because I felt more familiar with his company, I went and got setup next to him.
We did some paired exercises to get us ready for the day before all of our cohort, including myself and James got a message to meet in one of the conference rooms for our induction with Eoin (pronounced Owen).
In the induction we covered a wide range of topics from what is to be expected of us, and what is to be expected of the coaches… getting to know each other better and create the first friendly bond and even to ask questions.
Towards the end of the meeting we were shown the work that we would need to complete and what time frame we had to complete them.
After our induction meeting we set off and go straight to work independently on something known as ‘The Golden Square’.
The first part of these exercises where designed to help focus our work on TDD (Test Driven Development).
This was done using a gem called ’RSpec’.
RSpec is a testing tool for Ruby, created for behavior-driven development (BDD). It is the most frequently used testing library for Ruby in production applications.
— Marko Anastasov
TDD was not a strong point for me on the pre-course and I struggled to understand the full concept of it and how to write it.
That changed after today, I now have a good (but basic) understanding of it and I plan to practice this in my spare time to hopefully become better at writing TDD scripts for Ruby.
I and everyone around me knows how important it is for future software development.
We worked independently all the way until lunch time which was scheduled at 12:30 until 1:30. We all decided that it would be best if we went on lunch together, as this meant we’d have a better chance of getting to know each other on a more personal basis. This was a great experience and made some really good connections.
Going back into Makers after lunch, I felt much more accepted and far more comfortable being around my new friends/peers.
At 14:00, we had a online zoom meeting with one of our coaches, Alex and the rest of our cohort. This was a chance to meet and see all the other cohort members that were working remotely. Although we were muted, it was a great experience.
The main purpose of this meeting was for Alex to explain the next step for us. This was to get paired up with a member of our cohort and do some paired programming. Our pairs were determined by Alex on Slack.
I was paired up with Luke who was also studying onsite with me.
What a great experience! Luke was more advanced than me when it came to understanding the TDD material quickly and I found myself not understanding everything completely, but that was okay because Luke was very supportive and he slowed down the pace so that I’d have a better chance to keep up.
This method of equality programming is very important because instead of one person being the ‘top dog’, it allows everyone to be good at everything. This disperses the work flow around and more evenly instead of it landing on just person.
At around 16:00 we joined another zoom meeting. This meeting was made so that we could meet most of our coaches and what their roles were.
This was an awesome experience and it was great being able to meet and know where the support was.
Overall, I really enjoyed today and I cannot wait for tomorrow to come!
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