“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

Makers Academy has finished. And I’m bereaved.

After my last post, I had a pretty intense two-week period with a rather amazing team. We created an app called, ‘Save a Nation’ which turns saving towards a property deposit (a near impossible feat for young people, especially those in South-East England) into a social gaming experience.

We offer a little tour on the homepage to whet your appetite before signing up. We made the templates responsive so the app works nicely on a mobile or tablet. Do you like the 8-bit styling? :-)

Before you commit to a target, you can calculate how it translates into monthly, weekly and daily savings.

On saving some money, your efforts are rewarded with a badge, as well as ‘coins’ to spend in your virtual house.

You can see how you’re progressing against your monthly, weekly and daily targets.

Any updates from you or your team appear in the newsfeed.

And the really fun bit is that using the coins you earn from saving, you and your team can create a virtual house!

Sorry those screenshots are a bit pinched — I’ve only got an 11 inch Macbook Air. (Although I’m not knocking it — it’s been a surprisingly powerful and reliable beast during the course!)

Diving into the unknown.

What makes me immensely proud of what we did was that we plunged into the deep end by choosing to code in Meteor, a full stack JavaScript framework which (by default) uses MongoDB. This was a really risky move as we were unfamiliar with Meteor and had no experience with no-SQL databases (Mongo uses JSON documents to store data, which is completely different from the relational approach we’d been taught on the course). Had we chosen Rails, we could have progressed so quickly, but that’s not really the Makers way!

We only had two weeks to start and complete the project (including all design aspects) so we were pretty busy with tutorials for the first couple of days, and figuring out how we could take a test-driven approach.

Meteor is really quite astounding when you first encounter it. Doing the tutorials made me exclaim, ‘Wow!’ several times and I was really quite taken with it initially. It’s magic. Although, as we’ve encountered before, all of this magic can make it quite tough to extend and de-bug later on when you try and do more complex things on your own. But we got there. We defeated some pretty meaty bugs. And the virtual house stuff is EPIC. I’m really proud of us.

And I now feel confident that I could turn my hand to pretty much any language and framework and figure out a way through. Result!

The joy of UX.

Before we got cracking on the coding, I did a bit of UX work (of course — I couldn’t help myself) and created an interactive prototype, some user journeys and a site structure diagram.

This interactive, mobile-first prototype (created in Axure) gave us a feel for how the app might work once created.

And these artefacts (staples of the UX profession) helped us uncover and address some important questions about how the app would work early on, for example, would it be mandatory to save as a team (in the end , we decided no — it should be useful and fun for individuals too).

So what now?

Well as of Monday 19th December, I am officially back in employment as a UX, and I already have two projects to deliver in the first week of January. Busy busy!

I love my job. But I really, really miss coding and the intensity and immersion of Makers Academy. To anyone considering doing something like this, grab the opportunity with both hands. I had to save for a year to make it possible for me, and now I’m juggling overdrafts and still wearing the same clothes from 2007/8, but I know for sure that it was COMPLETELY WORTH IT. I can’t wait to put these skills to the test.

Thanks so much to all those who supported me, and to you, lovely readers, for following my journey. I’m amazed and humbled by you.

Frances xxx