My experience in the Featurepreneur 2 day workshop
I am a pre final year student pursuing Electronics and Instrumentation with almost no prior experience in coding. I happened to come across the 2 day workshop conducted by Featurepreneur through friends and I thought why not give it a try.
“Admitting that you don’t know something is the first step to learning.”-Amy Neftzger
Initially, it felt like I just entered a whole new world of coding and I wouldn’t understand a word of the “developers jargons”. Here is the part where most of us get intimidated and back off since we often tend to find everything overwhelming. This is where we need a mentor, this is exactly when we need a team to support us, to give us a warm welcome and tell us “Its going to be alright soon”. I cannot stress enough the value of practical knowledge through hands on experience by working on small projects over mere bookish theoretical knowledge.
I am a person who craves for immaculate perfection, which basically means I spend all my time learning how to do it and never get started even after an eternity. But what happened in the first day of the workshop was worlds apart. I was asked to take over the wheels, Raja sir and his team gave me their AWS account and guided me step after step on how to create an EC2 instance. As an engineering student I attend tons of webinars and workshops and I can tell you, this one was different. I had never seen a session so interactive and letting you try things on your own instead of the regular monotonous lectures.
The topics we learnt included basics of AWS , EC2 instance deployment, flask and python, MongoDB, JSONs and basic Jinja web template, HTML and Bootstrap, Github and a few important mainly used Git commands along with linux terminal commands. If it wasn’t for the 2 day workshop I would have spent 3 months learning about each topic i just stated and still wouldn’t have gotten a firm hold of any of the practical implementation of those topics.
The perks of learning through doing projects are immeasurable. I was encouraged and perfectly guided to develop a simple web application SongZ, that retrieves certain information about a song when entered by the user. We got to travel along a smooth learning path about topics one after the other. I learnt an overview about the frontend, the backend working with flask framework to develop the web application and the database storage using mongoDB all in a single mini project.
“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” -Benjamin Franklin
I felt more confident as I've had a gist of all those topics. The experience was simply excellent. I never could have imagined the amount of hands on experience we could get within a short span of 2 days. Raja sir and his efficient team made sure I understood every step of the process, they were more than happy to answer my million questions(again, no prior coding experience so probably more than a mil). A remarkable point is that his adept team is comprised of all youngsters mostly of my age group, so the rapport was undoubtedly significant. Long story short, it was definitely fruitful and a very exciting experience.
