My Microverse Journey Part 1

Htet Naing
5 min readAug 19, 2022

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Do you know that you can now become a professional software developer even if you don’t have lots of money and years of time to invest?

At first, I thought it was not possible to be a professional developer without investing money and years of life in university or college or some other platforms. After joining Microverse (an online school for software developers), I see now it’s possible to become an all-rounded professional developer even if people don’t have lots of money to invest first. 😎

“In the first part of the article, I’ll discuss the skills I got from Microverse. Even if, I am still in the third module of the program.”

Before mentioning the coding skills, I’ll talk about the soft skills that Microverse taught me. At first, I was thinking “coding skill is everything”. I was focusing on improving my coding skills and didn’t think much about other factors such as professional profile or the professional mindset. All of my developer profiles on Linkedin, Angelist, and Github were showcasing only the repositories and works. That was so boring. Whoever sees my profile would think “The owner of the profile is such an average developer. There is nothing special about this profile.” However, after joining Microverse, they taught me strategies like USP (Unique Selling Points), elevator pitch, how to identify myself from the rest of the developers, and so on. So I have applied most of the strategies. The results can be seen in my GitHub profile, my Linkedin profile, and my Angelist profile. Although these profiles still need to be improved, you can see how informative yet interesting and fun my profiles have become. My communication and collaboration skills got sharpened a lot because of daily meetings, collaborations, and pair programming sessions. This is just about soft skills.

Here come the hard skills. As soon as the program start, I have to build my own personal portfolio and the capstone project. To be honest, even though I luckily passed the JavaScript coding challenges using my google surfing skills, I didn’t know anything about JavaScript and I thought it’ll be so boring to learn JavaScript. However, Microverse makes learning JavaScript interesting and fun. That’s why I didn’t feel slight pressure throughout the JavaScript module. You can see the JavaScript capstone project, Pokeverse, I’ve made in 3 days.

The amazing Pokeverse presents you with the followings:
- the list of the Pokemons and their abilities fetched from the Pokeapi
- users can like and comment about the pokemons. Like and comment features are provided by the InvolvementApi

The same applies to React and Redux. You can see projects like Mathgic built with React.

In this mathgical world, you can perform any math operations using the Mathgic device.

and Bookstore built with React-Redux. They were all built in 3 days. I didn’t have any JavaScript or React or Redux knowledge prior to Microverse.

The amazing BookStore project will let you display, add and remove the books you are currently reading. The books are stored online.

There are lots of projects which I didn’t mention like To-Do List, Leaderboard, AwesomeBooks, and so on.

This is exactly how Microverse improves not only my coding skills but also my soft skills. Imagine getting those skills by just staying in your favorite place with a laptop. 😎

Photo by @Jason Goodman on Unsplash

“Secondly, I’ll discuss how supportive and encouraging the Microverse community is.”.

The people in Microverse are super friendly and supportive. Whenever I need help, every senior Micronauts are willing to help me as soon as they are available. There is no one who is hesitating to accept a zoom call or to give time to troubleshoot the code. Of course, there are times when the blocker is too large and they need to turn down the request. But as for me, whenever I need help, everyone at least takes a look at my blocker and joins a zoom call nonetheless they can help me solve it or not. According to my experience, the bonds get stronger and stronger as I proceed through the program. I am currently in React module at the time I wrote this letter. I ended up joining a group called Lazycoders in which active and friendly previous partners have fun, chill, and provide tips and tricks to each other actively. We even have a website of ourselves.

That is exactly how fun, active, and supportive the Microverse community is. 🥳

Photo by @priscilladupreez on Unsplash

Conclusion: I’ve mentioned the hard and soft skills I’ve developed throughout the program and also about the Microverse community. When the time comes, I’ll rewrite the details about the skills I have improved through the future modules and how fun it is being in the community of Microverse. See you in my next article.😉

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Htet Naing

Full-Stack Web Developer. JavaScript, Rails, React, Redux, Flutter, Laravel. Improving open-source projects, one commit at a time, spiritually ✨