What it’s like to be a part of the Chingu Voyage
And how I evolved as a developer and an individual.
I’ve started teaching myself to code in July 2018. While learning, I came to know about the Chingu Voyage program through Medium. I found it very interesting as it was giving the opportunity to build something while collaborating with other like-minded people. So far I’ve been building small projects on my own, but by joining this voyage I could level up my skills and learn to work in a team at the same time! So I signed up for the program. Though I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull it off successfully or not, but I knew that the only way to find that out was to give it a shot.
The journey begins
After a few days, I was confirmed as a participant and was paired with two other girls from different countries. My team’s name was Toucans-team-17. We were added in the slack workspace of the chingu voyage. It took me almost a week to become comfortable with this new setup and atmosphere. After that, we came to know that one of our teammates could no longer be with us on this journey. Initially, I was a little worried that this might affect our team adversely. My teammate Anna Borisova reached out to the founder of chingu voyage ‘Chance’ to ask him if we were going to get a new member in our team. He suggested us to move ahead without one.
Finalizing the project concept
Now my teammate and I had to decide that which kind of project we wanted to make. We had three options — a clone, a landing page or maybe a game. My teammate was less interested in cloning an existing website, so this option was ruled out. Now we had to choose between making a landing page or a game. I was not very keen about building a game, because I knew that we weren’t skilled enough to do so. So eventually we decided to build a landing page for a fictional product. Though we wanted the concept to be organic. So after asking about each other’s area of interest and brainstorming a few ideas, we ended up finalizing the idea of a website where people could submit their New Year resolutions along with their email ids, and they’ll start receiving email reminders periodically about whatever their resolution(s) were, in order to help them be accountable towards actually completing it, as it is a very common problem that we make new resolutions every year but very few of us actually finish it. We could not use any databases or stuff because both of us weren’t familiar with the back end stuff. We named it ‘Resolutions Buddy’.
The ‘Javascript’ struggle
After finalizing the concept of our project, it was time for us to get our hands dirty and start the real action! My teammate asked me to make use of bootstrap if I was confident enough with it. Although I’ve worked with bootstrap in my previous projects, still after giving it a thought I decided to use a bootstrap theme/template. We had drawn some wireframes on paper, to have a basic layout of the page. But we were clueless when it came to applying javascript in the project because both of us were familiar with basic elements of the language but none of us knew where to begin. I reached out to a few experienced people, and they were kind enough to take the time from their busy schedules to answer my questions. Still, I wasn’t sure what my first step should be. But as they say, “you have to jump into the ocean in order to learn how to swim”, so I decided to just begin with all the javascript I’ve been learning so far. I added a few lines of code just to see if it makes any difference, and to my surprise, it did! I decided to go ahead with jquery instead of vanilla javascript because of the compressed syntax of the library. From this point on there was no looking back for me. The first hurdle was cleared.
Becoming friends with Github
I wasn’t very comfortable with GitHub before joining the voyage, and have been hesitant to dive into it as it seemed too confusing and intimidating for me. But once I became a part of a team, I had to get out of my comfort zone and learn to be familiar with its various elements. There were a lot of roadblocks, such as configuring my text editor to work directly with GitHub for a smooth workflow. I had absolutely no idea how to do that, and my teammate and I had to try three different editors in order to get the easiest way of accomplishing that. Our search ended on the ‘Atom’ editor. Though I was comfortable enough with my favorite Brackets editor, sadly it didn’t give me the option for GitHub integration.
Final submission and accomplishments
Another challenge for me was to make the jquery work exactly the way I wanted it to. Sometimes I was so confused that I just wanted to bang my head on my laptop! But I didn’t want to leave the project midway, as I was determined enough to complete it. After innumerous trials and errors, I finally submitted the project on 21st January.
I felt so relieved that I was able to finish it on time! There were different levels of emotions- from excruciating frustration and confusion to overpowering happiness and excitement. And I have to admit — what a MINDBLOWING experience it was!!! I learned so much, challenged myself, pushed my limits, got out of my comfort zone several times. It made me comfortable with the remote collaboration stuff, which is a must for anyone who wants to have a remote or freelancing career. As a matter of fact, it even pushed me to do something I believe I totally suck at — WRITING! And that is why this is my first ever article!!! I’m so proud to be a part of this amazing journey, and I have to thank Medium for that, and of course the founder of Chingu Voyage — Chance, who is giving this wonderful opportunity to people like me every year. I also have to thank my lovely teammate Anna for being so nice and supportive throughout this voyage. I apologize if I’m forgetting anyone’s name (I’ve got a bad memory 😝). Will surely edit this post if I’ll be able to remind myself of anyone I’ve unintentionally couldn’t mention.
I believe that every newbie or aspiring techie should definitely take advantage of this excellent opportunity, it’s totally worth it!!! If you liked this post, then please show your appreciation by clapping. Feel free to ask questions, I’d be happy to answer. You can also follow me on Twitter or Linkedin, I’d love to get connected with more awesome people 🙂. Oh and yes, if you’ve got a moment then please have a look at the project and let me know what do you think about it. Here’s the link — Resolutions Buddy. Thanks for reading the post.
