Tom Coakes

We did it. Eleven weeks of coding (fifteen if you want to count the pre-course) and I’m now in the position where I can work collaboratively on a relatively large project with many moving parts. Software development is weird. I love it.

At the end of Friday we presented our completed project to our peers plus a whole bunch of faces I didn’t recognise - and it went really well! I’m usually not too phased by public speaking, but for some unexplained reason (and despite the fact that the stakes were pretty low) I managed to work myself up into a nervous stupor in the build up to the graduation event. Other than missing a small cue (sorry again Carrie!), it all went smoothly and came across as a pretty slick and professional presentation.

Our final app is a difficult one to demonstrate, but can be found here if you’re interested. There are two sides to the app: the publicly accessible side for teenage girls attending STEMettes events from their mobile is one of them, but there’s also a whole backend admin portal for the staff to read and edit all of the information that gets entered into the database. For some of this functionality we were lucky enough to stumble across Ruby gems (we built our app on Rails) that were well-crafted solutions for certain features that would have taken us forever to build ourselves. Perhaps there’s something to be said for building that stuff yourself from scratch, but if it already exists you may as well make use of it, right?

Without going into too much detail, my team worked brilliantly together - all playing to our strengths and sharing tasks collaboratively using waffle.io as a Kanban board. There were four of us, so working in pairs was the obvious thing to do for the most part, but when we were tackling particularly difficult bits we’d power through it as a four in order to solve stuff quickly.

So that’s the core part of Makers Academy over. No more official lectures, projects or challenges. Until last week I was really sad about that fact, but now I think I’m glad it’s over. I’ve loved every bit of it, but three months of such intensity is absolutely knackering - I don’t think I could do any more. I know that this was the right decision, but the proof will be in the next few months. Whether I manage to get a job before I run out of money will ultimately come down to my own work ethic, and after spending so long in what feels like a very safe environment, it might take a little time for that self-motivation to return to its pre-makers level.

Before starting at Makers, I’d attended two of their “graduation” events. I use inverted commas because it’s really only a graduation by name - there’s no qualification or formal ceremony at the end of it, and more than anything is an excuse to celebrate the end of the course whilst showcasing your work to your colleagues. On these two occasions it was a strange feeling watching the teams proudly (and somewhat awkwardly) present the projects that they’d spent the last two weeks slaving over. I knew that I’d reach this point myself at some stage in the future but at the same time couldn’t really imagine the path to get there.

Well I’m here now, already one week in to the two week project that will hopefully act as my most substantial example of coding on my GitHub profile. The project I’m working on is an interesting one - I’m on the only team that chose to work with a charity, which comes with a few pros and cons. It’s definitely great to be able to work on something that feels genuinely useful and has the potential to be in the wild as a real world product, but that does raise the stakes a bit and added pressure isn’t what I’m necessarily looking for.

Our client, STEMettes, works to encourage schoolgirls to enter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) industries by holding events and workshops. The app idea that they pitched to us involves gamifying the attendance of these events with points and prizes. Problems arose on Tuesday morning when we had difficulties getting in touch with the charity to talk through their idea in more detail and acquire something that resembled a brief - so we took the initiative to just mockup and wireframe what we THOUGHT they wanted in the meantime.

On Wednesday we were able to have a proper meeting, and although it required a bit of a change in direction, we hadn’t been too far off after all. Unlike with some previous projects that I’ve worked on during my time at Makers, it definitely felt like we were doing this one ‘properly’. Working in a really agile manner, using continuous integration to manage deployment from the very start of the project, and carefully managing our Git branches for working on new features or bug fixes. Very satisfying.

Oh shit, it’s nearly over isn’t it. Week nine marked the final full week of ‘learning’ a prescribed topic, because what follows will be a two-week long final project and a week dedicated to employment. Speaking to others on the cohort, there are mixed feelings about this three-month journey coming to an end. I’m firmly in the ‘please don’t let this end’ camp. I feel like there’s still so much to learn and I’m apprehensive about doing so with the training wheels off. That said, I’m also very excited about getting a job and continuing to learn.

We were learning about Rails this week, which was a bit of a shock to the system after spending so much time in JavaScript mode. Rails is cool though, I like it, despite the fact that at times it makes you feel like a chimp just pressing buttons. So many things that I’d learned to do myself when using Sinatra and Datamapper are just taken care of by Rails, so I can see how it would easy to take it for granted and rely on it to do all of the legwork for you.

Again, it’s such a large framework that it doesn’t feel incredibly useful to spend only a week on it but I’m no longer concerned by that feeling. Whether I end up using it in our final project, or end up with a job as a Ruby on Rails developer - I’ll begin learning it for real when there’s a practical need to do so.

This long Easter weekend’s challenge is to build a clone of Instagram (no pressure). Although it sounds like a huge job, I can see in my head that Rails is going to automate a lot of the work for me.

Makerthon! I loved this week. It was such a change of pace, and felt like there was some real purpose to what we were doing.

After pitching app ideas on Monday, we voted for the projects we’d like to work on and were put into groups from Tuesday onwards. We had a solid group of 5 and worked pretty seamlessly together from the very start, falling into areas of responsibility based on our strengths - and the end result is live on the web here: www.journeats.com

The time constraint (we only really had about 3 and half days to build it) ended up being a lesson in what our MVP should really be - we admittedly were a bit too ambitious from the start, and as the week progressed certain features had to be cut, and others were only dropped moments before our presentation on Friday. That was a big shame, because a lot of effort had gone into the Yelp integration that never got finished. Had we been given just one more hour, we’d probably have managed it!

I ended up largely responsible for the design of the app so first mocked up a couple of design ideas in Photoshop before then building them from scratch in HTML and CSS. I could probably have made it a little easier for myself by using a framework like bootstrap but I enjoyed the practice of trying to manage all the custom elements manually. CSS is a bitch, but I’m beginning to crack it. The back-end API calls were managed by other people on the team so it was sad that I didn’t get much exposure to that, but when that code was completed it was handed over to me to start plugging into the interface using Angular. Needless to say, I learned a LOT about Angular this week - much more than I did last week - and I’m a fan. Would be interested to explore a bit of Facebook React to compare.

The more I learn about the JavaScript ecosystem, the more I like it. As my first exposure to programming, Ruby will always have a special place in my heart, but JavaScript seems to me to be so much more versatile and widespread. The idea that you can build something using only one language across the full stack just makes sense to me and far easier than needing to codeswitch all the time. I’m extremely happy that I haven’t been boxed into learning only one language/one framework etc. as I likely would have been had I tried to learn this stuff alone online.

It was a big week - I’ve now been introduced to AngularJS, node.js and a number of other small task runners and templating engines. Node and Angular are BIG topics, and I feel that a week is certainly not enough time to gain a good understanding of either of them (never mind both of them!), but it was useful all the same to pull back the curtain on these technologies that I’ve heard about for so long. It surprised me to learn that AngularJS was developed by Google (and React by Facebook), because I think of these companies as faceless entities interested only in producing proprietary software for their own gain - but I guess that’s not the case. Front-end frameworks have come about to make everyone’s life easier by just offering some fancy shortcuts when doing common tasks in JavaScript.

These frameworks seem a lot less intimidating when you think of them just as extremely complex JavaScript libraries - hundreds of functions that have been prewritten that you could effectively write yourself, just like jQuery. It’s strange to me that it’s taken until now for these frameworks to come about, given that JavaScript has been the language of the web for so long.

The teaching style at Makers has changed pretty significantly this week (something that they all too often attribute to being ‘Agile’). There are no longer the same number of lectures as these have been replaced by smaller coach-led scrums and breakout sessions. There was some resistance in the cohort at first (it would have been nice to have been asked about the change), but they’ve provided enough channels for giving feedback and the change has ultimately proved to be a worthwhile one. I do miss lectures because I always felt that I gained something from them, but I appreciate that it’s not the best way for everyone to learn. Provided they’re managed correctly and mix up the groups every so often, this new style is much more personable and attentive to the needs of every person in the cohort, and the speed at which you can get assistance with a problem has dramatically increased.

Do I feel like I know how to use Angular after a week? No. Do I know where to go to find out more about it? Absolutely, and I guess that’s all I can ask for at this stage. Actually producing something with this knowledge is going to be a thousand times more effective for learning than following tutorials, so I’m looking forward to the upcoming project weeks. Node.js also feels like a behemoth of a topic, one on which I’ve barely scratched the surface - but I think I really understand what it’s used for and how it works. There’s something to be said for being able to do everything with pure code and understanding everything that is going on under the hood, but unfortunately it’s neither realistic to be able to learn all that, nor is it even that useful. Why reinvent the wheel?

As I expected, reading week (or lab week if you prefer) was pretty difficult for me. At the outset, I wrote down a number of ambitious goals that I swore to have completed by Sunday, but only fully achieved a few of the things on the list. Yes, I could have made better use of the week - but I could also have done much worse. This course somehow manages to make you feel guilty about your work ethic, despite the fact that I’m coding for between 10-12 hours a day. Perhaps that’s just me.

We're almost halfway through our time at Makers, a feeling which is equal parts terrifying and satisfying. Friday marked the two year birthday or Makers Academy, as well as being the graduation event for the current seniors. A host of diverse and impressive applications were showcased and it was clear by their level of polish that a lot of love and effort had gone into building them over the past two weeks. The final projects are organised by the coaches - we're given the opportunity to pitch and vote for project ideas, but ultimately the team you're in and the app you'll be building are decided for you. Sure, you may end up with a project that you're not completely in love with, but that happens in the professional world too. Besides, all of the senior cohort's projects were interesting in one way or another - some of them using cutting edge tech such as beacons and mesh networks. Pretty impressive when you figure that these people couldn't even code only twelve weeks ago.

Week five was all about JavaScript. I'd heard a lot about how learning your second programming language could be particularly challenging, especially when moving from something as 'developer friendly' as Ruby to the less-forgiving syntax of JavaScript but I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I picked it up. It's given me a refreshed appreciation for Ruby since discovering that so many Ruby methods that I'd taken for granted and assumed were common to all languages are in fact not at all. Setting a default value for an optional argument couldn't be simpler in our old pal Ruby, but in JavaScript it took me a full line of pretty inelegant looking code to do the same thing. I've also never had to rely on so many bloody for loops. I've heard about a JavaScript library called underscore.js that brings a lot of this type of common functionality to the barebones of JavaScript, but I'd feel like that would be cheating whilst I'm only learning.

Had a great pairing experience with Yannick this week, flying through the course materials at breakneck speed and learning a lot in the process. For the first time I actually felt ahead of the game, given that we were completing tasks before having the associated lectures for them. That's probably the most satisfying part for me in all of this - the ever more frequent moments when it feels like the training wheels come off and I'm able to discover something through referencing documentation in exactly the way that a real developer would.

Things are starting to get exciting. I feel that we're now close to the tipping point at which we know enough of the fundamentals to take almost any idea and stand a fighting chance of building it. The smart thing about the Makers "curriculum" is that it teaches you the essentials, and then provides you with the tools to figure the rest out for yourself - and I'm only now understanding why.

As a developer in the real world, there's no practical way that you can memorise or even learn everything you'll ever need; the web changes daily and the languages and frameworks that you use today may be different tomorrow. Being a successful developer means knowing where to go to find information, and knowing what to do with it once you've found it. I've now started doing this for myself and it feels like I've stepped into a world of unfathomable possibilities, where every app idea suddenly feels like something I could potentially build for real. Best not get too confident though, I've still got a hell of a long way to go.

This week was another struggle, at least for the first few days. The teaching style didn't fit my learning style, and it resulted in me feeling overwhelmed and at times, disengaged. We were following a tutorial written by MA for the most part, and unlike in the other weeks, it felt very "hand-holdy" and lengthy. The topic was databases and security, a fundamental part of almost anything we'll build and there are so many moving parts that I didn't feel like the knowledge was sinking in at all. I much prefer to be given a brief primer and then thrown directly into the deep-end, at which point I can learn to swim for myself. Given the material, I can now sort of understand why it might be taught in that fashion, but there must be a way to improve it. It sounds like our cohort isn't the first to become frustrated by it, as it's now being reworked.

As is now becoming routine, my fears of falling behind were proven to be unfounded by the weekend challenge. A surprising amount of knowledge had made its way into my brain, and the walkthrough was a great backup reference for the few times that I had difficulty researching the problems I faced. For the most part, I acted like a well-trained developer and sought out the official documentation for tools like DataMapper (an Object Relational Model), PostgreSQL (a database manager) and our old friend Sinatra. There were also a fair few gems that were used this week for various tasks; I'm starting to appreciate the extensibility that Ruby provides as a language.

The app I finished last night and can now show off is a simple Twitter clone named 'Chitter', and it's live on the web here: http://chitterapp-tomcoakes.herokuapp.com

I'm quite proud of this one, there's a fair bit going on at the back-end. I think there are mixed feelings on the course about designing on the front-end, perhaps because it's so fiddly and isn't really 'development work' per se. For me though, I actually really enjoy playing around with HTML and CSS, especially after spending a long amount of time back-end coding - it's a welcome break from having to worry about the logic. I'm not the greatest designer in the world but I've found that just trying to keep it really simple usually produces something not horrendous looking. I look forward to working more on honing this skill because I've got ambitions to become a full-stack developer.

Week three is over, and I finally have something to demonstrate that doesn't involve the terminal! Our weekend challenge was to create a Rock, Paper, Scissors game and stick it on the web, and a bonus task was to then turn it into a multiplayer game. The links to both of these are http://rockpaperscissors-tomcoakes.herokuapp.com/ and http://rockpaperscissors-multiplayer.herokuapp.com/. I should probably bring them together and make it just one app and give the user the choice between single/multiplayer.

So, they're not perfect by any stretch. At the time of writing this, I think there are a few ways that the multiplayer version can crash because I'm relying solely on Sinatra's sessions feature and initialising the Game class only one time when the server is loaded. For example, it works as long as only two people are on the site at a time, but it'll crash the whole thing if another person joins... I guess I'll work on fixing that tomorrow. Feels so good to have something live though!

If you'd have told me on Wednesday, or even Thursday, that I'd have been able to create this by myself I wouldn't have believed it. Once again, this week brought with it a significant rise in difficulty and complexity. Previously we'd only been working with code in isolation - building backend apps that only worked in irb - but in week three we had to learn no less than three new technologies to bring it all together. Sinatra, Cucumber and Capybara.

Luckily, I didn't have to tackle this alone. My pairing partner for the week was Gabe, and despite the fact that we took our sweet time to make it through the materials (and didn't come that close to finishing), we learned a hell of a lot. As Makers keep telling us, that's the most important thing. I'm looking forward to "Lab Week" in week 6 (or is it 7?) as that'll be a great opportunity to go back over many of these unfinished projects and hopefully see them through to completion.

Boy, did the pace pick up during week two. We were effectively continuing to focus on OOD/OOP and testing, but just on a much more complex scale. I may have felt a little complacent on Sunday evening, having finally become comfortable dealing with objects and messages, but it wasn't long into our second task on Tuesday before I began feeling completely overwhelmed all over again!

From modelling boris bikes in week one, we moved to the game of battleships, which involved many more moving parts and also significantly less direction from the coaches as to how it should be done 'correctly'. With the boris bikes and airport challenge from last weekend, it was a lot more clear-cut whether design decisions were a good or a bad idea - the projects themselves were much simpler so it was fairly obvious which objects should be responsible for which methods. For battleships however, this was really NOT obvious and highlighted the importance of good planning before beginning to write any code. I think that one of the reasons it's difficult to learn this stuff when you get out of the initial 'learning the syntax' territory, is that much of programming is subjective. When you're faced with a seemingly infinite number of approaches to a single problem, there are going to be some disagreements as to which is the 'best possible way', and this makes it difficult as a newbie who just wants to be told "Yes, that's correct and no, that's incorrect".

I struggled with pair programming this week, in comparison to last week's experience. My partner picks this stuff up very quickly, and although he was very patient with me, I simply didn't think that I was learning anything on Tuesday as I let him do his thing and just sort of coasted along. It's not recommended, but in order to get a good grasp on this high-level conceptual stuff I had to make sure that I could accomplish this stuff on my own as well. I spent Tuesday evening building the battleships game from scratch using a different approach and focusing solely on creating an MVP with limited - but essential - functionality. 'Lo and behold, I realised that I had in fact learned enough to get by on my own which was a huge relief and saved me from a week of continued anxiety. Next week we're moving onto web technologies and APIs, and because these are more hands-on and hopefully a bit less conceptual than OOD/OOP, I'll find it a lot easier to pair with anyone of any skill level.

It's been so useful to have everyone else learning around me. Not only is it great to be able to knock about ideas with each other, offer help when you're feeling ahead, or receive that same help when you're not - but it's also a massive motivator to just be in the presence of other people learning. If I was learning this same stuff on my own at home I would have the same incentive (work towards earning a junior web dev role) but my level of motivation would be a thousand times lower. Some people can study on their own, but I just don't think that I'm one of them. With most of my days at Makers Academy ending between 8-9pm, it's a hard slog, but by no means a chore.

I knew going in that this was going to be an experience unlike any other, but it still took me by surprise. I've read so many of the student blogs available online (there were about six months between me signing up for the course and actually starting it) that I'd fooled myself into thinking I knew about everything the course entailed and how my body and mind would react to it. Not so!

I've absolutely loved my first week at Makers, despite having already been through a rollercoaster of personal successes and failures each and every day. It's definitely the most intellectually stimulating and demanding thing that I've ever done - university pales in comparison. Maybe it's the intensity of the learning regime, and the feeling of pressure lingering in my mind that comes from needing to understand these core concepts before we move onto subsequent ones next week. However, some of the best advice they give you is to just let go and trust that you'll keep up. It's unlike any other form of education, whereby you're grading yourself against everyone else and to leave a project incomplete is to fail - at Makers it isn't a race, and it isn't a competition. You're there to learn as much as you can, as best you can, and when it's over you'll have the skills and resources to continue learning into the future.

This week was about introducing us to two really important concepts, both of which were entirely new to me. During the four week pre-course, I'd got to grips with the basics of ruby and was able to fairly confidently complete basic challenges on sites like www.codewars.com, https://rubymonk.com and ruby-kickstart. However, the way I'd become used to completing these challenges was very procedural, performing one action after another in a very linear fashion - which isn't really the way that good software is produced.

The first new concept to get to grips with was Object Oriented Design and Object Oriented Programming. For most complex problems there are various entities interacting with one another, and OOD is about managing those complexities by separating everything into different 'objects', only allowing them to interact with each other where absolutely necessary. This was (and still is!) a really difficult idea to understand because it's so abstract. I've still got a long way to go before I really feel comfortable with the idea, but I've learned so much since Monday.

The other thing that was new to me was unit testing. The general rule is that we shouldn't be writing any code without first creating tests. The tests act as a specification for the functionality of our code, and then we build up the software around them, one small step at a time. It breaks down the process of writing something that's complex and daunting into many smaller problems that are much easier to manage on their own. At first I struggled with testing because it felt like such a slow process, but on Wednesday something just clicked and I realised the value in it.

We're only one week in and I already have two fully tested examples of object oriented code on my GitHub profile - the Boris Bikes project and the Airport Challenge. They're both real world scenarios modelled in software, and so it's fairly easy to visualise all the different moving parts and how they speak to one another, but I'm curious about how you use object oriented design when you're dealing with the back-end of a website. I guess time will tell.

I could probably write an entire blog post on the topic, but I just want to make a quick mention of the atmosphere and culture in the Makers Academy office. Sure, Makers is a business first and foremost, but through everything they do for you, you don't feel like you're 'just a customer'. There's no feeling of us vs. them between the staff and the students and instead it's a bit like being in a university library in that everyone is responsible for their own learning and progress and there's help available whenever you need it. They go above and beyond to make everyone feel comfortable, and 'Chief Joy Officer' Dana is a big part of that - she runs awesome yoga sessions and seems like she'll be able to keep spirits high during even the toughest weeks.

Hello! I’m Tom, I’ve just joined Makers Academy, the intensive 12-week coding bootcamp in East London.

In the lead-up to joining Makers Academy, I found many of the student blogs to be an invaluable resource for a couple of reasons. They gave me a good idea of the sorts of technologies we'll be tackling on the course, (so I could try to read up a little about them beforehand) but even more importantly they gave me a really accurate insight into what life is really like at Makers and ready myself for the roller coaster of emotions and personal struggles that awaits.

Even with the best of intentions, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to keep this blog updated daily - perhaps I’ll end up just posting a weekly review on each weekend - but either way hopefully it can help persuade someone else to make a similar jump into this world of uncertainty and excitement.

Day one was unusual in that there wasn’t any fingers-on-keyboard coding taking place, as there has been for previous students. Instead, we were given the opportunity to bond with the rest of our cohort as much as possible and be introduced to the course as a whole. Adhering to the agile methodology that Makers stress is hugely important within software development, and these guys run Makers in the same way. Rather than designing a half-decent course "curriculum" and then resting on their laurels forevermore, the course itself evolves and develops iteratively and constantly. The February cohort that I'm attending benefits from all the experiences that came before it, and we'll even be guinea-pigging some new ideas entirely. It became very clear throughout the day that the Makers Academy culture is open, transparent and just incredibly friendly.