It's better to code with friends

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

• Ming Yong
• Sophi Li
• Rafael D. Hernandez

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.