Photo by Guille Álvarez on Unsplash
It’s been a long time since I wrote my last article. This is because I’ve been quite busy with the Basic Programming course, of course :). We finished it this Monday, on 27th of April. Oh, what a thrill it’s been… Let me share some insights!
First of all, I’m proud of the team and their HUGE accomplishments. Most of the participants have never programmed before, some had 0 technical background and they are now working as a team developing a larger project and I can see they are enjoying what they learned.
How, you ask? Well if looking at the late night (1 AM) or super early morning (7 AM) Q&A sessions between the members on the Whatsapp group is not enough, you can still see the multiple commits at normal and “odd” hours too :).
Being a night owl myself, I can easily relate to the late hours activity of the team (even after 5 months of Basic Programming!), and if this is not commitment, I don’t know what is. I can only imagine that the late hours activity for me are the same as the super early hours activities of a morning person, so the team is pretty engaged I would say :D.
Why are they engaged? Well, after thorough journey from procedural programming to object oriented programming, with a sparkle of unit tests and mocks, all wrapped in a clean code format delivered in multiple short, commits in git, we are also working on community project, which challenges everybody to apply pretty much everything they learned in the past ~5 months, in a real world scenario. Having to think about solutions, breaking them down and implementing them is also developing their problem solving skills in a new, better way. Even though they’ve been exercising weekly by applying the concepts on smaller, but relevant homework, it is much more rewarding for the whole team to work on a larger project, d’oh!
We began about a month ago while the course was still ongoing and we are still going at it even if the course has ended. We are working with git workflow so we are not affected by each others commits, so everyone can work at their own pace and availability (some early in the morning, some late in the night, others after business hours etc).
We sync three times a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday to discuss the progress, issues and the way forward.
Looking forward to finalize and release this project so I can provide more details. Stay tuned, I will follow up with an article when the project is live.
To wrap up, this is, in my opinion, the best way to end a programming course: by starting a real-life project with the same, committed and engaged team members!
Once again, I want to thank the whole team for their patience and their HUGE achievements so far and wish them success in the upcoming challenges!
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