Two Interns, a Junior and a FullStack project.
Last year DAZN sponsored six students to take part in Code First Girls NanoDegree programme. These six ladies were mentored one on one by DAZN Engineers during the duration of the course and we were very pleased to see them all graduate in September 2021 at Code Fest.
At the end of the programme, we were very excited to be able to offer one of the graduates a full time job as a Power Platform Developer (GO JANINE!) one of them already worked at DAZN and has been promoted to a Junior Data Engineer (WOO HAWA!) and two of them were given a one year paid internship to rotate through various Engineering teams. So we now have 4 out of the 6 graduates working at DAZN - Not bad!
We are now three months into the internship of the lovely Julie (pictured above graduating!) and Abi, their first stop on the rotation was with my team DX (Developer Experience). I am so proud of everything they have achieved in this short time and also sad to say goodbye as we now ship them off to their next teams! We have been reflecting on our time together and the project we delivered, here is our story and we hope to inspire any other ladies who are thinking of making the first step into a tech career.
Samm: I have worked at DAZN for around 3 years, 2 of which I was an admin assistant in the tech department. When covid hit I had to re-evaluate my role and adapt to the new world. I’ve always had a keen interest in coding, even did a bit at college and uni, so with the support of my manager I took the leap to switch careers and become a Junior Developer.
I had spent a lot of time learning, shadowing others, googling big words. So when I was told that we were soon to have two interns joining our team, I was excited to not be the only Junior anymore! It has been an invaluable experience to work on our own project together, help each other to learn and discover how to own a project from start to finish.
Julie: For the last 12 years, I’ve been working in IT Support. In 2020, when the UK went into a lockdown I decided to change careers and explore other roles within the tech industry. After completing courses with CFG and Leeds Trinity University, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career as a Software Engineer. I decided to explore the options of applying for a bootcamp and this is when I came across CFG’s 12 week Nanodegree back in June 2021. I applied for the Nano, got accepted with a sponsorship from DAZN, passed with a distinction (with a lot of hard work, stress and challenges) and the rest is history! 👩🏻🎓🤩
Abi: I learned some statistical programming for my undergraduate degree in political science, and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t consider making a career out of it until I signed up for a coding course to pass my time during lockdown. I didn’t realise how varied roles in tech could be and was delighted to discover a range of resources and communities to support people from diverse backgrounds get into the industry. A year later, I got a sponsorship from DAZN to join the CFG Software Nanodegree and the rest is history!
OVERVIEW OF THE PROJECT:
The project we were assigned to work on together was Rate My Service (RMS) Dashboard — which consists of a feedback button that can be applied to any DAZN internal app, and then a dashboard which collects and displays the feedback. As more people begin to use the RMS widget and the dashboard, we were tasked to add some new features which allowed the user to reply to feedback, as well as give it a facelift so it aligned with the branding of other DX products.
We worked in an Agile way, using Jira to log our tickets and check on progress. At the beginning of each task we had pairing sessions as a group with a Senior Developer from our team to get us started. We often worked on different tasks separately and then came back together to share what we had done. We created a shared PR on GitHub and then branched off individually to keep code changes and merges small and manageable, updating our shared PR together as we went.
OUR STACK:
FrontEnd: React + TypeScript
BackEnd: GoLang, AWS, DynamoDb
Testing: Cypress
FAVOURITE PART OF THE PROJECT
Samm: My favourite part was definitely working on the FrontEnd. I like to see my changes in real-time and using the browser tools to play around with styling 🌈 I am a very visual person so I struggled a bit on the backend coding tasks! I am also a big fan of React so learning more on that was great.
Julie: Surprisingly, I really enjoyed writing Cypress tests for the project. Cypress testing environment is a beauty, the command log and the app preview were so useful allowing you to see what it looked like when the tests ran and seeing all your tests passing is a great feeling! 🥰
Abi: Overall it was a really fun project, and I got exposure to so many new technologies and concepts — it’s hard to pick just one! While the learning curve from Python to Typescript and React was relatively smooth, there were a few concepts that just didn’t translate for me. For example, for the first two months I could not wrap my head around React hooks and props! After many tutorials, explanations and creative analogies from our buddies, I had a breakthrough in the final month and it felt like a whole new world had opened up to me! Of course my journey is just beginning but it’s exciting to take another step 😊
CHALLENGES WE FACED DURING THE PROJECT
Samm: The biggest challenge for me was understanding how the BackEnd communicates with the FrontEnd. After accepting that it wasn’t just ✨MAGIC✨ I had a few in-depth pairing sessions with some of the BackEnders in my team and did a lot of exploring on AWS. It was super satisfying to see it all working!
Julie: For one of the new features we implemented, we had to create a new API. This was the first time I’ve done something like this, so I had to learn how to set up a new infrastructure for the API gateway, write a Lambda function handler in GoLang which initialises the DynamoDb and then another function to update the database via a PUT request. For this we pair programmed with other engineers in the team to get it all set up and running, I still have lots to learn in this area!
There was another challenge on the FrontEnd with implementing a tickbox component — however we won’t talk about that since we killed off that feature. RIP tickbox ✅🪦
Abi: Other than a few classes on databases and APIs in the Nanodegree work, I hadn’t had much experience working in the BackEnd, so the area was very new to me. It’s a lot harder to visualise the effects of your code so you don’t get the same immediate visual as you can on the FrontEnd. I found that I couldn’t really rely on intuition or logic in quite the same way. This is where our pairing sessions with other engineers really came in handy. I’m looking forward to the moment when lambdas ‘click’ for me! 😜
WHAT DID WE LEARN?
Julie: I still remember day 2, I thought I cracked how to change colours on RMS via the node_modules to find out that if I delete that folder/reinstall it all that would be gone. 😅 Don’t worry, I know how to change the theme now, all done via Material UI styles. 😎
I carried on building my knowledge on JavaScript whilst also learning how to code in TypeScript. I learnt how to use React, what a Functional Component and Props are and just how useful they can be when it comes to reusability. Then slowly started to grasp the concept of React Hooks, thankfully we are in the modern world where there is a YouTube video for everything!
I also learnt a lot when pair programming with Samm and Abi, debugging errors and writing code. This enabled me to see how other people understand what the code is doing and how everything all links together. 🔗
Abi: I think I learned more doing this project than I did in an entire year of self study! From planning to deployment, I picked up so many valuable lessons that will help me be a better coder. But perhaps the most important lesson was how much being a part of a great team can impact your experience. Working with Samm and Julie, and getting support from others in my team, turned what would have been an insurmountable obstacle into a manageable challenge. Being able to ask for another pair of eyes, and in the most difficult of tasks to despair together (misery loves company!), was a reminder that coding should be a fundamentally collaborative process. Being able to learn so much, and even share some of my own insights from time to time made this such a rewarding experience.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Julie: My time in the amazing DX team at DAZN has come an end. 3 months have flown by, I still remember my first day starting at DAZN as if it was yesterday. Very grateful to have had the opportunity to work in DX with a bunch of talented, supportive and super nice people. They’ve set the bar very high for my next 3 rotations! 😁
Next stop will be at Team Atlantis, jumping straight into the BackEnd.
The BackEnd rollercoaster ride continues…🎢
Samm: Being the only Junior in my team, I was so excited when I found out that Abi and Julie were going to join me for 3 months. I have had so much fun on this project and I know we will keep in touch and continue to collaborate and share knowledge now that they have moved on to other teams. I will now jump into another DX project with all my new experience and keep learning as I go. I am also excited to continue to support similar initiatives with organisations such as Code First Girls in the future.
If you are thinking of doing something similar to Abi and Julie, I think we would all say JUST DO IT! With the right support and lots of hard work, a career in tech can be so rewarding.
