Maker’s Academy has its own gravity defying sense of time and space.
One week of intensive learning feels like taking a trip to the moon and back to another universe, and play it on repeat for 13 weeks straight.
In the past week, we have learned our second language, Javascript and built an interactive thermometer with JQuery. Most of all, we witnessed the future of ourselves when the seniors graduated with their amazing final projects, introduced by Tansaku, aka Madame Ruby.
Tansaku as fabulous Madame Ruby
Ski Buddy
Doctor Wow
Leftovers
I was particularly touched by what Tansaku said about why he traditionally dresses up in a costume at graduation – to honour the spirit of Makers’ grads for having the courage to leave everything behind and put themselves through an extremely uncomfortable process to learn to code in 12 weeks.
I could not agree more.
As if time had suddenly slowed down, we juniors gushed over the awesome final projects produced by the seniors, many built in technologies or languages that the coaches aren’t even totally familiar with. I was floored by an app developed to help people discover new music through shared interests that used Neo 4 J, a graph query language to visually represents database. How cool is that!
It’s terrifying to know that in 6 weeks time, we are going to be up there showing off our own final projects in front of friends and family. You can’t help but to wonder if it’s at all possible, but you go ahead and do it anyways.
That’s Maker’s spirit.
Lab week Gratitude
Lab week / hiring week has been rumoured to be the low point for many past makers as the seniors prepared themselves for the ‘real’ world and the juniors get a chance to catch their breathe and explore / experiment with whatever technology they fancy without any structure.
For me, it was the perfect time to rebalance and reflect on my journey thus far and playing with the MEAN stack. We even had extended happy hours (not that kind) when people get together and made sweet music while playing giant Jango. Yeah I know, it’s a playground with no age limit.
Learning to learn is not about keeping your head down and going at it in solitude. Though having a plan is a good thing, I have learned not to beat myself up so easily.
Most of all, it has been most rewarding to recognize my own fear of scarcity mentality, aka. not doing enough, not learning fast enough, not good enough. By sharing it with others, we can change our mindset towards one that is full of abundance and sufficiency. Like Dana said, we can make friends with time and ourselves.
I am enough.
All the hearts go out to September grads, and welcome Novemberites!
Makers Academy is a place of transformation. Most people come as career changers, myself included, aspiring to graduate with the super power of coding as a junior developer.
My first choice for super power will always be flying, but I guess I can make do with programming as second choice for now.
We had the honour of having Najaf Ali, founder of Happy Bear Software, who gave us an incredibly insightful lunch time talk on how to Kick Start a Developer Career. As with most things in life (with a few exceptions), it’s better to have somewhat of a plan when it comes to building a new career than running around like a headless chicken.
I like plans since I never had one.
WRITE | SPEAK | NETWORK
Share the LOVE
The tech community is very social. One thrives in such social space by connecting with people and sharing knowledge. Ali stressed on the importance of building a professional profile and having a presence in the community that will eventually compound overtime.
Writing blogs / articles– get into the habit of exercising your writing muscles by writing blogs or articles to share technical tips/ knowledges. It’s important to show your personality and have a voice. Your writing can surprisingly be a good point of reference and connects you to potential opportunities. Practice makes it better. Just because you know doesn’t mean everyone else knows.
Speaking at events / Conferences– ‘No one ever died from public speaking, and 90 % of talks at conferences suck so don’t be afraid to suck too’, Ali reassured us. Senior dev usually grow blind spots in explaining something technical and junior dev often communicate better in plain english. Start off with giving a short talk on Test Drive Development?
Networking – ‘Don’t be afraid to meet new people’. Attend tech industry meet ups can be helpful in connecting with like-minded people in the community and potentially create soft leads.
Side Projects – Your pet projects, something simple and manageable that’s completed and potentially open sourced will be the best indicator of your skills / interest to potential leads or collaboration.
Dream Job Assessment
WARNING: Don’t be the only technical person on the job!
Know thyself is winning half of the battle.
The definition of an ideal job may be different from one person to another. Take some time to answer the following questions before diving into the sea of job applications.
What things are important to you?
Job / financial security ? —> Big company vs. start-up
Remote working? —> 9-5 conventional working hours vs. remote working style or part-time
Senior dev as mentor ? —> Established team with senior dev vs. small teams with more responsibilities
Practice of Test Driven Development ?
Open source contribution?
Opportunities for attending conferences / personal development?
Other aspirations such as social responsibility?
5 Steps to Project Manage Your Job Search
Use a project management tool, such as Trello to map and keep track of your job search process.
Step 1: Collect Leads – start with 20-30 opportunities
In-bound leads
Referral leads
Job boards
Research
Recruitment (least desirable option – don’t ever go through recruiters)
Step 2: Rate Leads
Rate each leads against the dream job criteria that you have just mapped out
Step 3: Qualify Leads
Start with applying to anonymous leads and save your dream dream jobs for later application round
4-5 Application of qualified leads at once
Step 4: Application
State clearly what you are after – put “Available for full time position as Junior Developer” across first line of your linkedin profile and CV. No one has time to guess what opportunities you are looking for.
Tip 1 – Keep CV short and relevant to developer experience, 2 pages maximum. Keep all previous professional experience on Linked in.
Tip 2 – Make sure your github, blog post, linked in and twitter links are clearly stated on the CV
Tip 3 – Start the CV with 3 links – this is what potential employers are first and foremost interested in. Since they don’t know you, they will have to assess what you can do blindly.
Side project
Code Sample
Screen cast walkthrough of code sample on technical decisions
Step 5 : Follow up
Be PERSISTENT
Have a follow up schedule every 2 weeks until you have been outright rejected. If so, happily move on.
Negotiate Negotiate & Negotiate
You should never accept salary as a junior dev in London lower than 30K. Do not ever settle on the first offer you receive, be patient and get back to them after a week or two while look for other offers for more negotiating leverage.
Ask for 36K and shut up about it.
You won’t get what you haven’t asked for and you never know that you might make 3K more with an email even if you settle midway. 6 K means nothing to the company financially who are looking to hire junior dev, but the difference will kick start your career at the baseline.
Know that you are worth it.
Thank you Ali for such an invigorating talk that demystified the big scary topic of building a developer career. It definitely helps to have such practical and useful tips to navigate the painful process of starting out not knowing where to put your feet.
Perhaps in 7 more weeks there will be a follow up post on the actual implementation of the above mentioned strategy. But for now, I am happy to huddle in the warm and supportive environment of Makers universe until the winter comes.
This is how I feel at the end of week 4 working through the challenges of creating a simple bookmark manager. We had to implement functionalities such as creating/saving links with tags and most importantly, working with database. I must say learning about database is fascinating in understanding how data is managed especially at the incredible rate it’s being generated. However, the amount of information and content we are taking in everyday can get overwhelming as it progressively become more challenging at the end of the week.
I wished there was a brain ambulance on stand by ready to whisk me away.
This week I Learned
Relational database management vs. No SQL
Core concept of CRUD ( Create | Read | Update | Delete ) that refers to the four major functions used for accessing and maintaining databases
Navigating postgres (a relational database) in Structural Query Language
One to many vs Many to Many relationships
Linking database to Models via datamapper
Deploying the web application on Heroku
Concept of encrypting password using BCrypt
If it’s not already midnight, I could have probably saved all the above achievements in a database. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I need to perform some ‘auto-migrate!’ task to make room in my brain for learning our second language, Javascript.
Token pairing of the week
Mahmud (pictured above) had warned me about pairing with Andrew (below)… when I write bad code… :p
Holly smoke, it’s the end of week 3. Autumn came and leaves changed colours in purple and red. Time really flies when you are fully immersed in learning, reading, thinking and making code everyday. There is barely enough time to eat and sleep.
Looking back, I am proud to say that we have accomplished so much, especially the Star Wars themed battle challenge where two players enter to play and attack each other ( Sinatra framework, with tests written in Capybara / Rspec). We even managed to integrate the Star Wars soundtrack as our background music upon loading the page, which inevitably is stuck in my head at the moment, and irritates many fellow makers who unfortunately sit too close to us. (thank goodness no more Boris Bike rap from week 1)
Star War themed battle game
I never realized until I started searching for Star Wars hyperspace gif, that the world is in dreadful need of some high resolution large format Hyperspace gifs with speeding star !! I thought thirty years was long enough for people to come up with truckloads of this stuff?! Shocking…..
What I Learned
Aside from the technical knowledge and principles of good design, one valuable lesson I have learned at Makers is setting an intention for the day. It’s like setting the tone and texture of the day when you have a vague sense of where you’d like to be at the end of the day. Unlike a to do list, that punishes you with a sense of guilt whenever you are reminded of the things that you ‘haven’t yet’ done, intentions gently navigates you in the process of becoming who you want to be.
Pairing of the Day
Well, this whole Star Wars craze was fuel not by myself alone, but with my pair partner in crime, Sam, who’s elegant code and VIM fingering ability never failed to amaze / irritate the hell out of me (out of jealousy). I am proud to be your fellow comrade.
Then there is Halloween
Putting my architectural cardboard cutting skills and deadline driven creative thinking into best practice, Raphael and I decided to be cardboard box number 1Fat controller & cardboard box number 2Fatter controller. Gratitude goes towards the universe for gifting us such quality cardboard boxes when toilet papers were delivered at Makers around lunch time. I’d choose cardboard boxes over gold anytime, it’s like a dear old friend who you can always count on.
Fat controller waltz with imaginary Rspec friendDeon hijacked as minion fat controller and Raphael must have felt kinda tired?
I loved the fact that when I shared these photos with my architect friends, one texted back saying ‘Looks awesome, send me the final photos of the costume !”
Mongolian Princess Codes 
