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Zaynaib (Ola) Giwa
Zaynaib (Ola) Giwa

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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

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.

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