My experience at JENGA School sepa program during sprint 4

INTRODUCTION

It has been six months since i kick-started my software engineering journey at JENGA school. Although the journey has not been simple, the experience has been amazing. I’ve managed to finish 4 sprint projects, which is an accomplishment to be proud of. In this article, I’ll discuss my experience with sprint 4.

Sprint 4

Java and Spring boot were the foundation of the sprint 4 project. The project involved leveraging Open APIs and Spring Boot to create an open banking application. Being unfamiliar with java and spring boot initially made me nervous but i had to meet the sprint deliverables. I took the initiative to learn the languages which took around 2 weeks. I began working on the project and with the help of my instructor Dr Nderu, i was able to meet the project deliverables. Despite the fact that this sprint was the most challenging in the past six months, I learned a lot. Some of the technical skills i learnt were:

1. Java. Java Programming Language is a general-purpose, concurrent, strongly typed, class-based object-oriented language.
2. Spring Boot. Spring Boot is an open source Java-based framework used to create a micro Service.
3. Docker. Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker enables you to separate your applications from your infrastructure so you can deliver software quickly.
4. MySQL. MySQL is an open source relational database management system.
5. Open API. An open API is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
6. TDD. TDD is an iterative process of writing tests and implementing the functionality to make the tests pass.
7. Intellij. Intellij is one of the most powerful and popular Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for Java.

Some of the soft skills learnt during the sprint include:

1. Art of communication. I’ve learned how to speak with confidence and eloquence when giving a presentation. Before the sprint, I struggled with confidence during presentations, but I worked on it and will continue to work on it until I reach my goal.
2. Team work. We had to cooperate in order to complete the sprint deliverable because spring boot was unfamiliar to even my classmates. Finding answers to challenges requires a lot of teamwork.

With the concepts learnt, i was able to create a REST endpoint that returned a list of transactions and also build tests to ensure functionality.

Link to github repo : https://github.com/Sarah358/akiba

Conclusion

The sprint was really intense and not at all leisurely. You must pick up a lot of knowledge quickly. Even though the project isn’t finished yet, the principles learned so far are excellent, and I’m eager to finish it by developing a mobile application that uses the API. Overall, I had an amazing experience and am eager for sprint 5.

“If you really believe in what you’re doing, work hard, take nothing personally and if something blocks one route, find another. Never give up.” — Laurie Notaro

Thank you for reading