New Year New Notepad!


Yep, that's me all set and ready to resume week 11 of the 16 week Professional Development Course at Codeclan.  Thankfully our cohort is already fully remote so we won't have some of the upheaval that others will have following todays announcement.  Bert the Codeclan duck is at the ready to listen to me debug and notepad number 3 is ready and waiting to start the last module - Java.  But before I tell you about week 11, here's what we did in week 10!


 Working 9 'til 5


That's the hoped for outcome of this weeks inputs!  No coding this week (well not during class time anyway)  This week it is all about creating the brand of 'Us'.  This has been a hugely intensive course so far and this week is already proving to be more of the same.  No rest when you're updating your Linkedin profile, writing your personal profile for your CV and prepping for mock tech interviews.  My To Do list is growing at a rate of a mile a minute!


What a fantastic week though, jam packed with so much information!  We heard from previous Codeclan Graduates who are now working out in the Industry.  We had some great inputs on interview and presentation techniques - we all had to prepare a 3 minute talk on an item that we use for a purpose other than it was originally intended.  This resulted in some really funny and interesting presentations!  I also especially enjoyed the following two inputs.. 


A Day in the Life of a Developer


This was such a valuable input, so much information about how things work 'in the real world'!  This coupled with the fact that I have recently started volunteering with the Scottish Tech Army was so useful.  The STA is an amazing place full of enthusiastic friendly people and there are so many different projects on the go that there is definitely something for everyone to get stuck into!  What a learning curve though - Hello Jira and Confluence! Yes I knew what they were but had never used them before so there was some very well spent time navigating my way around them.  Sandbox was another thing I had never come across before, I was quite bemused to start with when I was invited to play in the sandbox, only to find out that it's a testing environment! 


Industry insights


Things are beginning to feel real!  I loved hearing about what jobs my Codeclan buddies are aiming for when we graduate.  My personal direction is still very open - to be honest I have loved every single minute of this course.  I'll really be quite sad when it ends (and will especially miss my buddies - I've been blessed with having a great bunch of people to be on this adventure with).  However, what I have realised over the Christmas Break is that what the instructors have taught us, in particular about HOW to learn, will stay with me as long as I'm on this Software Development journey.  I couldn't stay away from my laptop this break.  I kept having ideas about things I wanted to code - so off I was researching how to do x, y and z and then doing it!  I love how the instructors have given us the tools - and confidence! - to show us how to do this ourselves.  For example, I started coding my portfolio site.  So far in class, all we have coded is a one page app on Vue, but I wanted links to other pages - guess what I now have!  I love that week by week I am building on my knowledge, gradually the things that were difficult are now easy (remember how worried I was that I was never going to get the hang of it at the beginning of the Vue.js module?! - well I'm dancing about the components like I've been using them forever now!) and the things I have learned this week (Yes you Vue-Router and how to host my own site), will soon become second nature too and I will move onto the next new thing to learn.  I want more, everything about development excites me.  And that brings me back to my personal direction, I love it all, I will be delighted working on the backend - which is where my mind initially goes - as I believe a well set up backend makes everything so much easier for the front end development.  But once I've set the back end up I can't wait to get stuck into the front end!  So maybe full stack is where I will end up.  Who knows?  I don't yet, but I do know that I'm going to love every minute of finding out!

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