Makers Academy? Completed it mate...
INTRO
What a ride it has been!
After sixteen weeks, I am finally a part of the elite group known as the “Makers Alumni“.
For someone who struggles with focusing on any task, to manage to semi-consistently find time to document my progress, whilst keeping up with the curriculum and meaningfully contributing to all team projects..
.. I am honestly so proud of myself.
I feel nauseated at the prospect, but this post will involve a whole lot of patting myself on the back. However sad it sounds, I didn’t have many reasons to be proud or feel accomplished over last 15 years.
I will definitely make the most of it now 🙂
Today I will talk about everything I have learned during Makers.
I don’t even mean the technical aspect of it and stacks I worked with. This course allowed me find out more about myself. I recognise the importance of introspection and positive effects self-reflection can have, when implemented with purpose.
Let me tell you, what I found out about myself in the process!
LESSONS
Clear communication is EVERYTHING.
Seems like an obvious one, right?
Every issue I saw come up in any of the groups would always boil down to ineffective or non-existent communication.
I am a very straight-forward person, so I never found it hard to speak my mind. My years of customer-facing work taught me how to de-escalate situations, but also be able to handle confrontation. My confidence comes from experience, but this is not the case for everyone.
Especially in British culture I feel most would rather hold onto resentment instead of raising an issue. I acknowledge this is a generalising statement, but due to that being my experience I always try very hard to make everyone feel comfortable in speaking up.
Based on feedback from some of my team-mates I think I succeeded at that 🙂
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I always considered myself an introvert. I was wrong.
I am definitely an ambivert. Sure, my social battery capacity is low, but early on during the course I discovered I get genuine satisfaction from helping others.
I even got a reputation for it in my cohort. Not fully deserved, if you ask me, but I’ll take it 🙂
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I am 100% a team player.
Building on the previous lesson, I found I also excel in teams.
I hope my team-mates would back me up on that, but I believe I always bring fresh perspective, good ideas and very clear solutions.
There must be a reason why in the final project my team called me “Captain Konrad”! Whether that’s due to my leadership skills, or the pirate-like hard r’s I roll due to my accent, I’m not sure. Jury’s still out on that one.
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I finally found how I learn most effectively!
This one actually made me a bit sad, because I now understand, why I was never overly successful in my early education.
I can’t learn from listening to lectures. I can’t learn from watching videos and tutorials. Audio just goes over my head. I can’t focus any longer than 10 minutes at a time on a good day.
I can learn from written content better. It allows me to consume it at my pace and go back to it as and when needed. Eventually I face the same issue though. I often lose focus when trying to learn a general topic, if the scope of what I’m learning is too wide.
During this course I found that the singular most effective way for me to learn is to skip the high overview of what I’m learning and jump straight into implementation.
This sounds almost counter-intuitive because how can one write code without fully understanding it, right?
Perhaps it’s strange to some, or even most, but I don’t have the need to dive deep on every concept I hear about. Often I don’t even feel I need to know exactly, how code works under the hood.
I am a result-oriented coder. I distill what I’m trying to achieve into simple problems and then I look for specific solutions to those issues.
During our Acebook project (where we were building a clone of Facebook), we were presented with a MERN boilerplate for that project. A whole lot of people then took days to dive in and try to dissect every file and component, especially since this was the first time we encountered every part of that stack.
Suffice to say, I was not one of those.
First thing I’ve done is ran most of the code through ChatGPT and asked it to add comments, so I can easily understand what each file’s responsibility is.
Then I asked it to write me summaries for how the components interact with one another.
Only then I read through it to have context and I immediately started playing with the existent code and building on top of it.
Can I now fully explain to you what the MVC architecture is? Maybe not, at least not in an academic manner.
I can implement it though. That’s way more important to me.
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I’m a frontend man.
It’s important to have context of the codebase as a whole, of course, which is why I learned enough of the backend to know my way around.
Frontend seems way more my cup of tea though.
In the context of my further learning, now that I finished the Makers course, I definitely intend to put a lot of focus into learning about UI/UX, good design practices and diving deeper into building with React.
It just feels more fun to me.
The job market is not exactly blossoming right now, but I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid having to accept just any odd job and get a frontend focused position.
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I BELONG IN TECH.
Yes, all capitals. I found my place, my calling and my nerdy tribe. I wholeheartedly believe my future is in tech. In what capacity, I am not yet sure.
Am I going to climb a corporate ladder somewhere..?
Will I become an early employee at a startup..?
Maybe I’ll jump straight to building my own unicorn..?
Who knows.. 🙂
What’s important is that I am super excited about the future!
FINAL PROJECT: CAREER COMPANION
I have to write about the amazing project my team built for the Final Project Demo. I am so proud of our team for taking everything we learned during the course and building a REAL project.
Let me quickly give a huge shoutout to my team compadre’s: Sarah, Francesco, Adnan and Kassandra. We smashed it!
Alright, let’s get to it.
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‘Career Companion’ was an idea I pitched during the ideation stage for a variety of reasons.
I wanted us to build something, that would help stay organised in the job search as users, but also have something real to build upon as coders after the course.
Something with a real use-case. A product that could, or even should, exist out there and would help people in reducing some of the stress that comes with a job hunt and staying on top of it.
Admittedly, there is also a very selfish reason for me pitching this specific idea 🫢
I wanted to HOPEFULLY get on Otta's radar, seeing as they’re one of the companies I’d be most interested to work for and a CRM-like solution helping job-seekers might be right up their street 🙂
I’m shameless, I know.
If you’d like to see our project demo head HERE!
I’d love to hear your feedback too.
If you are currently job-hunting stay tuned, beta will be released to the public by the end of the week!
(Also, if you are currently looking to hire an absolute monster A-Team, our inboxes are open 🙂)
OUTRO
Overall, I had a great experience during the Makers Academy bootcamp!
I learned to code, how to work in teams, how to learn and met some of the absolute best people along the way.
This is only the beginning of our journey in tech and I have absolutely no doubts, that we will all do and build amazing things!
As for myself, I have about a hundred things on my ToDo-list now so..
TA-RA ❤️
Good job mate!