Week 9 — suddenly it is calmer

After the intense week doing the Santander projects this week felt so much more relaxed and calmer. After a retrospective on the projects, it was a week of visiting other companies and lots of guest speakers, as well as some new learning.

The visits were to Innovation Birmingham and Lightbox. Innovation Birmingham was very inspiring, we learnt about all the help and mentorship there is available to start-ups in Birmingham. I missed the Lightbox visit as I had to get back early that day for my children’s school concert.

I will probably forget some of the speakers from the start of the week but towards the end of the week Doug Scott a venture capitalist came to speak to us about how he and others help entrepreneurs get funding. He had some great stories to tell!

Rob Styles gave us a workshop on Test Driven Development which was brilliant — clear and relevant and gave us the chance to apply what he had taught us.

Jess White also came to speak to us to give us some ‘naked truths’ about working in the tech industry and had lots of advice. As Jess is Nottingham based I am sure I will bump into her again, probably at a tech meet-up as once I finish the daily commute to Birmingham I will have time to get to some of the meet-ups in Nottingham.

Matt Rose spoke to us about CV writing and interviews. There is so much conflicting advice with CVs, as Matt himself told us. The key is to just experiment and optimise, but it’s hard to know where to start with so many different things to try. Maybe I will just work on sorting out my portfolio website instead…

We had a go at making a card slider/carousel, without using a pre-made library, following a specification which was fun and absorbing. My favourite piece of code is now React’s dangerouslySetInnerHTML what a wonderful name 😃

I also met up with my mentor, chatted about the Santander project and I got to ask lots of random small questions that tend to crop up in my head. We also chatted a bit about design for my portfolio website — I described a bit about what I wanted to do and he said he would send me a link later to help. He sent me a link to a tutorial on smooth scrolling (I hadn’t known what it was called before) and so after doing the tutorial I have actually started my website.

Another fun task was making a user-unfriendly volume control — great fun!

Only 7 weeks left…