ONE WEEK IN AT MAKERS
Probs gonna be a short one today, I'm pretty tired but its Monday which means blog I must!
Its been an exhilaratingly stressful awesomely frustrating week. Weird combination of adjectives? Yep! One up, one down. Except the downs are good too.
One of the first things emphasized by our amazing coach was that the process of learning was what it was all about. The completion of the tasks was not the priority. This might seem strange to the traditional way of learning with grades and exams, but 20 previous cohorts with a 90% employment success rate says otherwise.
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| Nothing distracting in this high-octane learning environment. NOTHING! |
On top of the skills we learn off our coach, Makers also takes care of our mind and body well being as well. The oddly (but probably coolest) titled "Joy Coach" of Makers meet every day for some meditation and occasional yoga. It is important that she knows no coding whatsoever. Both things I would never do, but I am trying many things out now. At worse its a nice very light calming mid afternoon nap to keep us going.
PAIRING IS SHARING
Much of the Makers course is influenced by researched methods of learning, much from the infamous Google "new age" way of working. Freedom to set our own times is pretty abundant here, we have a schedule for workshops and activities but nothing is strictly set. As long as we attend and try and complete the weekly task then its ok, we're all adults here.
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| Jokes on YOU we're using Ruby we don't have em BRAH! |
There is a lot of research to suggest the benefits of pairing. Pairing is where you code with one other person. In our instance, we are given a weekly task to do and we work on it changing partners everyday.
There are quite a number of benefits to doing it this way;
- If you zoom ahead then the next day you will have to help your partner catch up which means plenty of explaining of what you did. This is great for the guy who is behind to learn, and great for the ahead guy who has to explain things which is great for clarity.
- You see different styles of coding, thinking, working. You can learn off each other and improve bits here and there.
- Its good bonding time, and makes coding social! (Wow!)
However, I do wonder outside of a bigger group that can swap around like this if its that good. The swapping kinda evens out the skill level overall so it benefits everyone. But if there is a pairing where one is a lot more advanced, it is hard to not be intimidated and/or take the back seat on things.
HALF UR CODING TIME WITH TDD
I talked some last week about finding about this horrible thing called TDD. Test Driven Development was something that is an industry standard way of developing something methodically.
As I love to make things, and am impatiently so, as the title says this doubles the time it takes to create something because you are creating a test and then testing each step of the way.
Like I said before, the syntax is rather different to what we have been learning so far which is rough. Our coach said that it feels bad as our coding is at a certain hight level, and TDD is super low, so the gap is big. Strangely enough it seems bigger for me as I have previous coding experience!
But maybe one day I will love it. I doubt it, but who knows? I'm here now innit!
I'm interested to see how my motivation keeps up during these weeks. Its fair to say that since starting this year, my motivation has probably dwelled like 2 times, both mainly because I finished my youtube notetaking and basically didn't know what to do. Here is an interesting video by MPJ who is a developer for Spotify talking about motivation (whilst getting lost?).
Hmmm this was "short" eh? lol. Talk to u guys next Monday, have a fantastic week!
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