Week 10 on the BT Digital Intensive!
Module 3 anyone??
Module 2 ended last week and while we had been building our foundation in Python, now we are beginning to learn how to build on this knowledge and put it to use! We started our week with some independent API projects where we got to pick fun tasks to tie together our new API and Flask skills.
By Tuesday, we properly kicked off our Module 3 and for the rest of the week we focused on using exceptions and validations to error-proof our code. We also revisited past projects to add these tests in and improve what we had done. We are practicing how to think in terms of how we would be working in the future and its so exciting to to see ourselves shaping up for our eventual jobs as developers!
Tell us, what were you doing before the programme?
Izabela Pastuszynska: “After working at a tech company as corporate social responsibility manager / Project Manager for 6 years (and 10 years total in this line of work), I decided that it’s time I tried my hand and at something new. I thought it would be an awesome challenge to step into the shoes of software engineers. Having worked with them for most of my career, this role reversal seemed to have an equal sense of challenge and excitement.”
Martina Fernandez: “Prior to commencing the programme, I was completing my undergraduate studies in Linguistics at Cambridge. I was introduced to Code First: Girls through their beginners coding course in first year and slowly familiarized myself with basic Python through some online self-learning. In second year, I had my most significant insight into the potential and excitement of tech with the computational linguistics module of my tripos followed by an undergraduate research internship learning Python and Machine Learning. By the time I graduated, all these glimpses into coding confirmed an interest and redirection into tech and I wanted to continue shaping my skills. I came across the course through the CF: G newsletter and been happy I have since!”
Can you tell us some of the highlights from this week?
The absolute winner this week was putting all the puzzles together to have a web app on Flask with working APIs and even some nice CSS in many cases.
We got some weather forecast apps telling you what to pack for holiday, random story generators or apps showing ‘correlation’ between crime rates and air pollution.
The sense of accomplishment was really there, as beforehand we had practiced using APIs and Flask in isolation. It really did feel great to have it all click together and turn into a functional app.
Most of us now had found out what roles we got and so which cities we will be moving to. There has been a lot of excitement in the
room around moving, finding accommodation and starting the new chapter as a software engineers (think this is slowly sinking in now!).
And what did you learn this week?
- How fun APIs can be and how to use Flask to display our API work.
- How exceptions and validation can help us with debugging our code.
- How to manually raise exceptions and return informative and user-friendly error statements and how to check our user inputs.
- How familiarity with our frustrating errors in Module 2 is now useful!
- How to improve our code for our users (make our code user friendly).
- That the BT canteen has really nice chocolate muffins!
Final question: If you ran BT, what would you do?
Iza: “If I ran BT, I would provide free coffee on Monday mornings to start off the week! On a more serious note, I would try an encourage employees to get involved in various volunteering initiatives. Either by sharing their knowledge or contributing time to whatever causes are important to them. Personally I would have a BT team running the London half marathon for charity.”
Martina: “Continuing with the recognition that tech needs diverse perspectives, I would introduce a language mentoring programme for BT employees. Through this, we could volunteer our language knowledge to support other coders for whom English may not be a native language. Hopefully, with some native language support/translating, non-native English speakers would overcome any language barriers and have their introduction to tech facilitated.”
The BT FurtHER Digital Intensive is a partnership between BT and Code First: Girls. Find out more about the project on the CF:G website here.
