The journey of being a software developer is a never-ending journey of learning. This journey can be daunting if you are going about it on your own. So my advice to anyone who is beginner their journey or a well seasoned veteran start coding with your friends.
I graduated from a coding bootcamp over a year ago and my progression kind of hit paused. That structure of bootcamp was gone and I got stuck in what is known as tutorial purgatory. It's when a person goes through coding tutorials step by step but when it comes to doing projects from scratch it's hard to do. I stumbled upon Chingu Cohorts, a community of developers that improve their skills by doing project-based work. I thought that this would be a good way to learn how to work on a team, meet some new people, distract me from the fact that I don't have a job, and pick up some new skills along the way.
I got put in a team with three awesome people
We decided to reverse engineer the Momentum App. By the end of the 6 weeks, we accomplished our goal Check it out here.
Here are a couple of skills that I picked up during my time with my cohort.
Project Management
I learned how to coordinate schedules from people in different time zones.
Used Agile development methodology to keep track of our progress and used a tool called Zen Hub that is integrated with GitHub.
We created a user story in order to determine our most viable product(MVP).
I learned how to do Code Reviews
Git Skills
Learned how to merge git branches via terminal
Learned how to create pull requests and how to use them to keep track of an issue
Javascript Skills
Learned how to call an API using async/fetch
Learned how to use ES6 modules
Practiced clean code practice by creating meaningful variable names and using single responsibility rule for creating functions
TLDR;
I feel like I lucked out with my team members. They showed up and showed out. I learned how to work on a team, learned essential soft skills and improved my understanding of vanilla JavaScript. I can't wait to join another voyage. If you are interested in reading detail weekly accounts of this voyage checkout Rafael's dev.to articles which links sprints 1 - 6 written by other members of the team.
Top comments (0)