School [Of Code] Trip to London
On Monday 30th October the School of Code Bootcamp went on tour to visit the offices of tech wizards Facebook and Pivotal!
Like any good school trip, we’d planned an action packed day in London, heading down on the morning train from New Street to Euston. Thankfully for us, we weren’t actually responsible for children, or else we’d have Clare’s mum on the phone asking why she got separated from the group before making it on to the train...
We arrived at Facebook’s main office (with Clare in tow) on Brock Street at 11am, admiring the glass elevators that ascended into the sky as we checked in with reception. Once we’d gone up a lotta levels we arrived at the spookily decorated floors of Facebook, in full halloween mode!
We met with Daniel Paine, Security Recruiter at Facebook and our host for the day, before having a tour of the office. It’s as cool as you’d imagine, with chill out spaces a-plenty, drinks and snacks round every corner and colourful art prints covering the walls (the rock climbers amongst us were particularly impressed with the in-office bouldering wall).
“Facebook’s offices felt like a really creative space and I loved how it was all laid out. I also appreciated that they went hard on the halloween decorations.”
— Ben Rosell
Following Dan’s tour he chatted to the cohort about the lifestyle at Facebook and their hiring process, including the mind blowing fact that they take on approximately 30 new starters every week in London alone. We were then visited by one of the software engineers working on React at Facebook, Dominic Gannaway. Dominic spoke about open-source coding, getting into React, and being headhunted by Facebook from a project on GitHub! This was particularly relevant to the Bootcampers, who were introduced to React only a few weeks ago.
“Facebook really is at the cutting edge of front-end development: the talk we had on React and how they use it was detailed and interesting. From their productivity and brain-storming rooms, to the recreational areas and the free food, it seems that they value their employees’ well-being and prioritise them!”
— Sharon Kaur
Huge thanks to Dan for facilitating the visit and Dominic for taking the time to come and share his knowledge and experiences with our developers in the making!
We then made our way over to Pivotal on Old Street, thanks to one of the Bootcamp mentors Emmanouil Kiagias hooking us up with an office tour and an afternoon of talks! Everyone loved the vibe at Pivotal, where the cafeteria was full of groups of colleagues eating and working together or playing ping pong. Pivotal puts on a free breakfast for their staff, encouraging teams to get together and start their day well! We were shown round the office space by Associate Director Mitchel Seaman, who talked us through the whole Pivotal process from planning to post-it-noting to product management (excuse the alliteration). A great thing we noticed about the Pivotal’s working style is that a team all sit on one island of desks throughout a project — software developers, designers and product managers all working together and sharing ideas. This collaborative way of working mirrors how we operate on the Bootcamp!
To reinforce these similarities further, Software Engineer Jonathan Sharpe then came to speak to us about the benefits of pair programming, a practice which the Bootcampers have used since day 1 of the course. At Pivotal all their engineers code together: 2 keyboards, 2 monitors, 1 computer. Productivity improves when you are able to talk through problems with the person sat next to you, and it also ensures everyone is on the same page throughout a project.
“It was great to see pair programming being used at Pivotal when we visited last week. It is something I was surprised to enjoy when it was first introduced at Bootcamp.” — Victoria Bate
George Lestaris then gave us an introduction into Cloud Foundry, an open source application platform for cloud computing which is backed by Pivotal. George works as both a Product Manager at Pivotal, and an active engineer contributor to Cloud Foundry! We then heard from another Product Manager Ellie Ereira who highlighted Pivotal’s agile working style and the shared responsibility of a team. Having adopted similar processes such as daily stand-ups and retrospectives on the Bootcamp, I think we all agreed with how important it is to collaborate in the workplace.
“Visiting Pivotal was an extremely inspiring trip. The principles they follow as a company reflects directly to what we are learning at the School of Code Bootcamp.” — Peter Yu
Finally, we had an extremely relevant talk from Denise Yu, a Software Engineer at Pivotal who just a few years previously had been a student on a coding Bootcamp. She passed on some very useful words of wisdom about finding your first dev job following graduation from a code course. I think it was inspirational for the cohort to see somebody who was in their position, now working at an incredible company like Pivotal! Read more about Denise’s journey here.
Thank you to all the staff at Pivotal for having us — to Mitch, Jon, Ellie and Denise for their talks, and particularly to Emmanouil for arranging the whole thing! We then made our way to Covent Garden (a particularly exciting time for our youngest Bootcamper Scott as it was his first time on the tube) for dinner and drinks at Big Easy before heading back to Birmingham.
We had a great day out and I hope it reinforced that the Bootcampers made the right decision in deciding to learn to code! Thanks again to Facebook and Pivotal for having us.
“Visiting these companies, I have realised that what we are learning at School of Code is exactly what the tech industry needs and is looking for!”
— Sina Dorostkar
