Jun 26, 2021
My experience during the first week of skaehub developer program.
I am a lover of technology but being in the developer program made me love technology even more. Its funny how one can learn so much within one week. At first i thought it will be a walk in the park but after i completed the first day i knew it was not a joke. I have learnt so much on python programming language that i can confidently say am good at python ,a language i had never interacted with before. Having to work in groups has really helped me and ive learnt so much from my group members ,Thank you to Joseph Mahiuha and John Kahenya. Some of the assignments were challenging but we helped each other towards solving them . I also learnt so much about version control from them and it was an honor to work with them.
Also a big thank you to Humphrey musonye our facilitator for your passion to helping us, you made my one week easier by your support. Humphrey emphasized so much on the need to think like a programmer and handling solutions based on human needs and that helped me a lot while looking for solutions. The environment itself at skaehub was conducive for learning and not forgetting the 10am tea and mandazi’s which kept us moving during the day .
Am not going to lie to you , the one week was intense and demanded a lot of commitments . During the one week i slept for 3 to 4 hours since i had to complete my assignments.
Every day you are hustling, learning new stuff trying to keep up and continue to do so throughout the night.
However, even though it was really hard, at the same time it was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. Everyday we had to learn new concepts and do some personal assignments and group work on the same.
During the one week , i have not only learnt on technical skills but also on soft skills. I have learnt how to communicate since we had presentations on our daily tasks, Keep time since we had to arrive by 8:30,work with my team mates and interact with them.
I also got to learn about slack which was the mode of communication during the program . We also shared some memes in the random channel just to make it more interesting .
On the technical skills ive learnt quite a lot but i will try to break down the points.
- Version control. I only knew the basics of version control and during the first week , my group members helped me so much on some concepts i did not understand for example forking, pulling requests, editing read me and commenting. I can now confidently say am good at version control.
- Working with Api. I was not really good at working with api but during the first week i expanded my knowledge on handling requests. Though i am not still at the best with working with apis at least i can say am somewhere from what i learnt during the first week of the developer program.
- Web scrapping . This is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. I had to work with some libraries like selenium and beautiful soup, concepts that i was totally new to. We had a task to extract the number of followers from a twitter account and it was an interesting group task which at first was challenging to do but we the found the solution thanks to humphrey.
- OBS studio. Most of the assignments we did, we were supposed to do a screen recording on the output and include the recording in our readme file. This is when i learnt about obs studio which is used for recording and streaming . I interacted with the software myself which was very interesting. Below is an illustration of what the software does.
5. Databases. The first task we worked on as group work was working with databases. We worked with sqlite3 in python, a concept i was new to but understood it.
6. Programming Logic. The most important concept to learn as a programmer is how to think like a programmer. Hence one should be able to solve real world problems using programming language . One of the personal projects given was on solving a real world problem and i chose currency converter for my project . Am still working on the project and in the project i will mostly be using programming logic in getting the solution.
This are among the many concepts ive learnt during the first week of the developer program. I hope to learn more during the other week since the program is 2 weeks long, which i hope was longer. If you have passion for software development like myself you should definitely look into skaehub developer program , your passion will surely multiply.
conclusion
The first week at skaehub developer program was incredible and i enjoyed every bit of it . I was actually surprised it was on friday, the days seemed to be passing faster than other times. I was busy all week that i did not even find time for social media which is a good thing for me . I feel so lucky to be part of the developers program and i hope to move on with the program and even enjoy more and learn other new things. This is a week where i feel so productive and am so glad for that .
Thank you for reading..
