Week 7

This has been an odd week of ups and downs, Monday started with a collection of tasks, to be done individually. Some were easy some more difficult, but overall ok. Then we worked in pairs on some algorithmic reasoning tasks on free code camp. I haven’t used free code camp before but found it well set out, although it didn’t seem to save the code once we had completed a task and moved on, which is frustrating as I like to go back and see what I have done, particularly if I come across another similar task. I enjoy doing these kind of tasks, it is like solving a maths problem and gives me the same kind of enjoyment. We were in new teams on Monday and in the afternoon in our new pairs we had an hour or so to make a new React app that gets random quotes from an API. I didn’t find the instructions very clear and we strugggled a bit, although we got something working in the end. A fairly frustrating afternoon.

Tuesday was completely the opposite, in the morning we had the task of making a React app that controls checkboxes linked to some data, and changing the data when the checkbox is clicked. We felt much more confident doing this, even though it was probably more complicated than Monday’s task. At lunchtime I met my mentor — we have all been allocated a mentor that works in the tech industry. We discussed some confusing code that I had found on the internet which turned out to have some great examples of bad practice in! Sam, my mentor showed me how it could be changed to be much more straight forward, using good descriptive names for variables and functions. We also discussed some of the differences between working practices now and the way I used to work when I worked as a COBOL programmer before going into teaching.

We have also learned about user authentication and using json web tokens. Jack from Mortimer Spinks has spoken to us about CVs, and had some quick one-to-ones with us to look at our CVs. This was really helpful as mine has been the same style as when I first wrote a CV back in the 1980s!

Yannis from Hyve came to speak to us about customer advocacy which was reallly interesting. The range of people that have come to speak to us is amazing and is really giving us a wide view of all aspects of industry that we need to be aware of as developers.