When working with others makes you better

Two and a half weeks in the program. Ten people from all over the world (Israel, United Kingdom, Korea, Italy, United States, Hong Kong) working together in the classroom. We are studying new concepts, acquiring new tools, trying to understand the best practices and the most important skills for web developers today.

We don’t sit and listen to lectures. This isn’t a standard classroom. It’s a place for collaboration. The mentors walk us through the concepts we are about to learn for a short time, and from then on, we try to figure out things in pairs or small groups. Never by ourselves.

It is a very different learning experience than school/university or even from a lot of other bootcamps. Working with others is challenging. It is not easy to be the one behind, when you don’t fully grasp a concept. It is perhaps just as difficult to be the advanced one, when you need to stop and explain to your partner what you know and understand, instead of just continuing and writing code on your own. It makes things more complex, and often takes more time. The language barrier in such a diverse community in which English is not the native language for most participants makes it more challenging to communicate.

But it is always worth it!

Working with others has some meaningful advantages that I would not replace:

  • Real world experience: developers in most places work with people, often as a part of a team. You collaborate with your peers, you communicate with your client, you try to understand what others are thinking and explain your own thoughts. You do part of the project, and almost never the whole thing. This is how we do it in class.
  • Teach others: when you are relatively new to a concept/tool/technique, one of the best ways to fully acquire this piece of knowledge is by explaining it to others. We all know the feeling of thinking that we know something, but then struggle to explain it to someone else. When you get the opportunity to teach someone else, even if it’s only for five minutes, you can deepen your understanding, not to mention help your teammate, which is always great!
  • Learn from others: when you sit with another “soon to be developer” and work on the same task or project together, you are going to learn. A lot. It is not only the materials that you are trying to grasp. It is the way your partner/s think that will teach you the most. There are so many different “correct” answers in programming. Your way is not the only one, and if you have and take the opportunity to listen to others and see how they tackle a problem, you will learn all the time.
  • Explain your thoughts: when you are pair-programming you have to explain your way of thinking, you should be able to clarify why and how you did what you just did. There are so many ways, so why did you choose yours? This process forces you to be precise about your code, about the way you solve problems, about all your choices from the color scheme through the folder in which you saved a file, to the number of functions you think you should include. In real life you will have to use this skill to explain similar ideas to your peers, your boss, and your clients.
  • Makes things much more interesting: when you work by yourself you can imagine, more or less, how your project will look like. You know the colors you like, the layout you prefer, the functions you know how to write, the next challenge you are planning to take. When working in a group, you have no idea. You know what you want to bring to the table, but the table is going to be full of things, some of which are not even familiar to you. Others would suggest ideas that you would have never thought about. This is the point when things are getting interesting. This is the point when you create things you didn’t think about previously.
  • Makes a strong community: we are a community. This is one of the things that defines Founders & Coders (and I will write a separate post about that soon!). Working in pairs and groups, when you share ideas, teach, learn, struggle together, solve problems, and find new challenges as a team, strengthens the ties between people. You spend a lot of time together, when most of the time you interact with others, not only with your computer. You get to know people from a different perspective, when you all have the same goal, and you reach it together.

After working for almost a year by myself, I see this experience as an amazing opportunity to learn and grow as a developer and although it is not always easy, it’s worth every second!

Founders and Coders

Our tuition-free peer-led coding bootcamp and Tech for Better app development programme help people from all backgrounds get into tech and make a social impact

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Vered Rekanati Mordechai

Written by

UI/UX Designer and Web Developer. Founders and Coders Graduate.

Founders and Coders

Our tuition-free peer-led coding bootcamp and Tech for Better app development programme help people from all backgrounds get into tech and make a social impact

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