Jo Pickering

By far the most exciting thing this week is finding out I’ve been shortlisted for interviews at the companies attached to the bootcamp! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a tough group to be up against which is also a little scary but I’ve picked some very me outfits for the interviews and I’m trying to prep my little heart out. Wish us all luck!

Content wise, I really enjoyed the last week. I feel pretty happy with the testing stuff we covered (although a bit more practise actually implementing some tests would be great). I’ve managed to get my backend API projects tidied up too, so feeling a bit more confident there too.

I also got a chance to go back and spend a bit of time on React and get my ‘React Playground’ a bit more functional. It’s sure as hell not pretty yet (I didn’t have THAT much time), but I’ve now played with all the main features. I was really grateful to have had another course member’s project to use as a guide and proud that I managed to develop on the ideas in it such as filtering props that had been passed down through components (rather than just at the top level) and creating a countdown clock!

I have been absolutely LOVING SQL/Postgres this week too and have been steaming through the content quite quickly. It probably helps that I’ve done so much data related stuff in Excel with PowerQuery and VBA, but it just feels really natural. I’m just getting to the point of designing databases myself and it’s been hard to take some time out from it to write this because I just want to play with it! It’s going to be my treat for later…

We’ve had some really great guest speakers this week too. One was an impromptu discussion with someone who does testing for their job, which was particularly enlightening. While I’ve always understood the value of testing, it’s always felt a little outside of scope at the moment because using tests hasn’t been embedded into the learning we’re doing and everywhere does it differently.

I’d come to the idea that it’s good to be aware of testing, but I’ll probably focus on it a little more when I get into work and understand their set up better. But this talk changed that perspective a bit for me and my biggest take away was to use tests as a form of learning, especially when you’re looking at other people’s code! If you’re struggling to understand it, runs some tests on it to unpick what different sections are actually doing. I’d not really thought about this before and I really love the curiousness espoused by this testing concept.

Chatting to Sim and Katie about their jobs in UX and development strategy were also really interesting. I’d love to get better at website design – this site could definitely do with a bit of a facelift! Hearing about what goes into designing a project was interesting too, it’s certainly a process that I’d love to be able to get involved in once I’m settled in my role.

It’s been great to get insights into all the areas involved in development and has really enforced my interest in the industry – not just the building, but how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. While I’ve always had a bit of an idea as to the other jobs in the sector, I have been exposed to so many things I hadn’t considered. I do love having things like this to mull over.

Hopefully I can get involved in the wider process wherever I end up working. On that note, it’s time to do some interview prep. A huge good luck to the rest of the cohort with interviews – if I’m not lucky this time round, I’ll be so proud of whoever gets the roles! It really is anyone’s game!

This has been a bit of a special week for me. Although my face has been hurting from my wisdom tooth extraction last Friday, I got a little taste of my dream developer life while working remotely and dog sitting for a friend in London. There’s something so freeing about being able to work efficiently in different environments.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being in an office – I love the camaraderie, bouncing ideas off each other and just generally feeling in the thick of it. I have, however, learnt that being in that environment all the time (e.g. Mon-Fri 9-5) takes a toll on me after a while and it’s important for me to have some work time to myself.

The balance of this offered by a career in software development is a huge factor in my career change. Hybrid working is an absolute must for me, for so many reasons. It also plays into so many of my other interests: problem solving, learning systems, making things and being creative. I thought a lot about which direction to pivot in and I just kept coming back to software.

And this week, I could taste what I’m working towards. It was incredibly affirming that I’m on the right path to creating a life that I actually want, rather than one I’ve fallen into.

It’s not all been roses though! The modules we’ve looked at this week have been quite dense to get through and I feel like I’ve hit the two thirds slump – when you’ve done so much and you’re ready for this chapter to end to start the next one. Thankfully it’s something I’ve experienced many times, so I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve to help.

One of the most significant changes I made was going back to my HalfBold Chrome extension. I’d taken it off early in the course because it’s a bit janky with some of the Codecademy pages (you initially get an error page and have to refresh to get the content to show), but at the moment it’s a price I’m willing to pay! It’s made a huge difference to my ability to take in content and made the second half of the week much smoother.

I’ve also been making sure that I’m spending my breaks swapping up the style of activity I’m doing. Coding is a very static, brain heavy activity so stretching or doing a quick chore has been important to allow me to switch off for a bit and come back to learning a bit fresher. I used to have 5-minute poi breaks every 60-90 minutes during my last work project (and that would be my ideal!) but I don’t have the space for that at the moment.

I’ve been quite enjoying the experience of backend so far. It’s mainly been Express Routing and OAuth which I’ve found conceptually simple to grasp, but as always, I’m struggling a little with the finer function logic. I get there eventually, it’s just slower than I’d like! It’s high on my practise list when I get a bit more time to focus on it. I’m REALLY looking forward to starting databases though, so bring on this week!

Rounding off the week I had my second mentor chat, which was incredibly helpful. I was initially a little sceptical, but it’s quickly become one of my favourite aspects of the TechNative bootcamp. I’ve learnt so much about myself since I last changed jobs/companies and getting advice on things like the recruitment process, handling the transition into a new company and clarifying expectations and boundaries has been invaluable.

We’re just waiting to find out which of our cohort have been successful in securing the jobs attached to this bootcamp now. I must say – I’m a little nervous. It honestly could be any of us, it’s such a strong pool of candidates! But at least I feel a little better prepared for the job search if this isn’t my opportunity. I’d just love to know so I can get the rest of my ducks in order. Fingers crossed!!

The absolute highlight of the week was getting together in person for the project 2 presentations. It was so wonderful to get to speak positively about a presentation and demonstrate what we’d been able to teach each other by working together. I really think the fun and communication shone through to the group of employers.

I was also incredibly impressed by the rest of my course mates. One of the groups had a tough time with workflow and communication but presented fairly and honestly. I was so impressed with how they didn’t let the negatives get them down, as I had last project, and have seemed able to brush themselves off and carry on. I have a lot to learn from that grace!

Equally, others in the group who had not been so confident at the start were presenting with a confidence that blew me away. It’s awesome to see the change in her over the past 10 weeks. Considering her technical prowess, she’s going to be a powerhouse in the workplace!

Following our presentations, we had 10-minute conversations with employees from both DabApps and CertN. These were a little scary, but I think I presented myself well and I enjoyed getting to ask some more questions about both companies. It’s safe to say we were all pretty shattered by the end of it though. Presenting yourself in such a way is quite exhausting, I’m glad I don’t have to do it all the time!

Well done everyone! Including the employers for being so friendly and helping to put us at ease.

I’m super excited to have started on Backend this week. While working through Node and Express JS isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, it’s been straightforward so far. I imagine it’ll change when we actually start coding it rather than just reading. What I’m most excited for is starting databases and this only intensified after our guest speaker this week!

It was really cool to hear from someone working with, quite frankly, enormous datasets. Their management, architecture and the additional considerations (GDPR) is really interesting to me. I think this stems from creating my own (fairly basic) CRMs at my last job and being involved in their digital transformations team to roll out a digital workflow across the whole organisation. Definitely something I’m looking forward too!

I took Friday off this week as I had my wisdom tooth out. Thankfully, it’s all gone well (the last one was a disaster) and I’ve been grateful to be able to take a little time back after such a busy period. I’ve rested well over the weekend and am ready to come back fresh Monday for more Express!

It’s safe to say my anxiety going into this week was thoroughly misplaced. Not only have we put together a site that I feel truly proud of, its been an absolute blast making it! It’s also really lovely to write a blog post that feels like a celebration, rather than unpicking the challenges of the week. A huge, huge thank you to my group mates for making this a possibility.

After getting the brief on Monday, we spent the entire day chatting and planning. As you know, I’d been concerned that my technical abilities were going to be a bit lacking during this project, but I am so glad I brought it up. It gave us all a chance to discuss our technical strengths, weaknesses and areas we wanted to improve. This allowed us to plan our workflows to support our learning needs, such as agreeing to do the more challenging aspects with Async API calls and Thunks is group coding sessions.

I feel like I really got a chance to shine when it came to breaking down the project. One of my group admitted to being a little intimidated by it and wasn’t sure where to start. After talking about my weakness, it was empowering to have a moment that I could say “oh, this is one of my superpowers – are you guys happy for me to lead this?” (thankfully, they were).

That’s not to say I broke it all down myself, rather we went through the site page by page, then section by section to determine what tasks we’d need to complete. While we were confident we’d get the mandatory and extra tasks done, we agreed to prioritize the three mandatory pages first and come back to the products page as our top priority backlog.

After the challenges with code reviews and prioritisation in my last group, I suggested we used a traffic light system for both reviews and backlog tasks. I think the rest of my group initially thought it was a bit superfluous, and it was for code reviews which we far less nitty and more constructive than before, but it really came into its own when addressing our backlog tasks towards the end of the week.

The actual code writing itself was a dream. We did the same thing as before and sat on an all-day call, which made troubleshooting or making code decisions quick and easy. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we found that we naturally fell into a pattern of solo coding in the morning and group coding in the afternoon. This worked so well for us that we had the basis for all the mandatory sections of the site finished by midday Wednesday, so we could comfortably move onto analysing the products page together in the afternoon.

Almost all of Thursday and Friday were spent working collaboratively on the final Thunk and API call we needed, before combing through the site – mainly on the front end to tidy up and improve the UX and UI. I really loved iterating through the site in this way, improving it more each time we combed over it as opposed to the expectation of perfection from the off. We had the chance to really talk about the changes we were suggesting, rather than having them dictated.

I was also really proud that I managed to suggest fixes during the Async parts of the coding. While I’ve read the material, I need a lot more practice to feel confident writing it so those couple of moments we’re really affirming that I’ve actually learnt more than I’d realised. The groups reactions and praise when my changes worked meant so much.

My final take away was how much fun we were able to have during the course of this project. I really loved that we’ve put together a very professional looking site, with incredibly nerdy and silly content. If someone had an idea about the site that made us laugh, it got incorporated in a way that made sense. It really reminded me of theatre improvisation groups – always say “yes”! As a result, I feel like the site really reflects our collective personality – something I think is vital in a portfolio piece.

This week has really affirmed what I expect from group work – good communication, support and a bit of fun. If you can prioritise these things, the workflow will fall into place and you will naturally create something wonderful. A huge thank you to Team Dagron – I’ve really appreciated the support and silliness. I’m really excited to present this project with you on Tuesday!

As predicted, not a whole lot got done on holiday and it took me a few days to recover when I got back (sharing a house with 15 other people for 10 days is a little overwhelming at times, but lots of fun was had). So, this entry has ended up as a delayed reflection on an entire course block covering React and Redux and will probably be a bit shorter than usual because it’s less fresh in my mind!

Week 7 was really long for me. I didn’t get a lot of notice for the amount of material I’d need to cover while I was away and I was really feeling the pressure. I did the best I could in terms of time management, but there’s only so much you can do with fixed deadlines and fixed scope. In the end, I averaged 12-hour days during the week and skipped the majority of extra practise content so I could ensure I’d seen all the content I needed for the next group project when I got back.

I won’t lie – I was already pretty frazzled by the end of that week and felt like I only had an overview understanding of the technologies. It wasn’t really an ideal situation to be in going into another group project, especially considering the stresses of the last one, and it felt me feeling pretty anxious over the subsequent weeks. I ended up spending a lot of time just trying to keep myself as calm as I could about it all.

Despite the stress, anxiety and overwhelm, there were a couple of wins that came out of week 7:

• I managed to explain the point (and use cases) for mocking tests and where it lived in Jest code to one of my peers. It gave me a boost that I’d picked up more than I realised.
• I started planning my About Me project and used ChatGPT as a sounding board for it. I was REALLY proud of myself for getting quite a complex project largely broken down and sense checked in about 2 hours! I tried starting to code it but had to give up because I realised I needed some more controlled practise first to solidify my understanding. It’s ready and waiting in my backlog though!

The Thursday and Friday after my return, however, were probably two of the most important days of the bootcamp for me so far. Our guest speaker, my mentor and Pete all said or called me on different things that made me realise that I’ve been putting far too much pressure on myself. I wasn’t being kind to myself, believing in my abilities or putting myself first and that had to change. You can read my LinkedIn post about it here.

So, I did the previously unthinkable and took the entire weekend off. I rested. I stepped away from the pressures of the course and trying to demonstrate, at every stage, that I’m employable. I allowed myself to accept that I just wasn’t going to be able to get everything done that was expected of me. I reminded myself that I’m changing my life. I’m not just learning new skills; I’m learning a whole new industry. Which means I’m also re-learning how to balance new needs and priorities with my own personal needs.

And honestly, for a while here – I’ve not been getting it right. I’ve been forgetting the ‘superpowers’ I already have, the ones that got me a spot on this bootcamp in the first place. I’m not going to be the strongest coder for React or Redux, but I’m a great manager. I’m really good at iterating through big projects and breaking them down into smaller tasks. I’m honest, communicative, and organised. Group projects aren’t all about the code – they’re also about demonstrating these skills.

With that in mind, I’m moving into week 10 with the following goals:

• Appreciate the skillset I already have and try to let that shine.
• Try to get a better understanding of exactly how much I understand of React/Redux and where I need more practise.
• Enjoy learning from my peers, who are going to know more than me (and that’s okay)!

I’m still nervous about the project and dynamic, but I feel a lot better about it than I did before. Wish me luck!

And with that our first group project is done! Monday was spent trying to crack out the last few mandatory sections of code. I’ll be honest - it felt a bit touch and go as to whether we’d finish, which was quite stressful, and we had to reassign sections of tasks to keep things moving – but we did it! To say I was relieved when the last section got merged at 3pm would be an understatement.

Overall, I think we’ve done a great job for a four-day project – the site is well optimised for different devices, the code base is pretty clean, and everything works like it should. There are a few things to tidy up, like the hover states for the tabs and the scoping of some of the CSS but it’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

The only thing I was a little disappointed with was that we didn’t get any further than the mandatory components. There was scope to have a products page with a JavaScript filter and to create a hamburger menu for mobile devices – both of which I would have loved to try (particularly the hamburger menu). I was so impressed to see that both other groups had gotten fully functional products pages coded and one had a working (albeit temperamental) hamburger menu!

I think the main reason we didn’t get here was the huge amount of time dedicated to code reviews and making tiny changes to the way things were written. While I very much appreciated the attention to detail and some of the bugs caught, I think a bit more balance was needed here to help prevent blocks in workflow and ensure that we were all writing code as much as possible. It also had the knock-on effect of making me feel like I wasn’t trusted to make reasonable code decisions, thus making me question my own abilities.

While there was push back on aspects of this, such as nits vs actual problems, I wonder if I should have instigated a wider conversation about the effects I was seeing on morale and workflow. It’s a fine line, everyone has their own idiosyncrasies that need to be worked around and little blocks are to be expected from this. At what point does the balance of these different working practices become untenable and need to be addressed more directly? It’s not that any particular approach is wrong, it’s more about understanding each other and ensuring we’re working together rather than against each other. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

I was actually quite nervous going into the presentations on Tuesday and I feel like I fumbled through my section (the website demo) a little. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best section for me to pick – having never done or seen a website demo before, but hey ho! I definitely need to remember to slow down and breathe, something I’m usually really good at. Mind you, I do I usually feel more confident in my knowledge of the subject I’m presenting as I tend to have been in a field longer than six weeks!

All in all, it’s been a really interesting and informative project. I’ve got a lot to think about coming out of it and in preparation for the next one in a few weeks’ time. I’m really proud of the site we put together and in absolute awe of the other groups (I know they’ll have had their weaknesses too, but damn they achieved so much). I’m also very grateful that I’ve been able to get some quality alone time during the rest of the week after such an intense few days of people-ing!

Just like that, we’ve wrapped up on HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript! During the latter part of the week we’ve been starting on React, which is hugely exciting. It’s giving me lots of inspiration for this site and the basics have seemed fairly straight forward. Sadly, I am having to rush through the content a little faster than I’d like to compensate for going holiday soon and as such I’m not getting the freer practice I need to get it a bit more embedded in my brain. But needs must – at least I’ll have seen it!

I’m hoping I’ll be able to keep up with this blog over the next few weeks, but I’m going to be in America for 10 days from Saturday for a wedding! I’ve got A LOT of course material to try and cover, as well as making sure I get some down time to enjoy myself and explore, so you’ll have to excuse if the schedule gets a little squiffy or I have to miss a week entirely. I promise to share a few pictures on my LinkedIn to make you all jealous!

If you’d like to see our group project, you can access it via the projects link in the nav bar and then scrolling down to Week 6. You could even stay a little while and peruse some of the other projects I’ve done through the course to see how far I’ve come – spoiler: I’ve come a LONG way in 6 weeks! Hopefully this blog is a testament to that too. Thanks for reading and I’ll catch you up again soon.

I’m a little lost with what to say this week. It’s been… eventful.

My biggest take away from the early part of the week is remembering to move on when I’m stuck on Codecademy! I tried to stick out doing a project and ended up more confused than when I started. I should probably have gone straight to Pete’s additional tasks and played there for a little while first.

Our second face to face day on Wednesday was wonderful. It was so lovely to see everyone in person again, we even got to have a beer (or two) together afterwards. To me, getting that social downtime together is so important. I feel like I’m getting to know everyone a bit better, and I really appreciated getting to have proper conversations with some of the group members who are quieter in meetings.

The group project itself has been a very big exercise in compromise. There’s quite a big discrepancy in technical ability in the group (with myself at the lower end) and communication has been challenging at times. I got a bit frustrated on Wednesday afternoon when a complex filing system was proposed which, after nearly an hour of asking questions about, I just didn’t understand.

This frustration was obviously picked up on by other group members but did lead to an honest conversation about our technical background differences which helped to reset some assumptions. It wasn’t the last conversation of this ilk over the week: with others on workflow, perfection of code and time management coming over the next few days.

Working in a group is rarely easy. What I am forever grateful for is the grace and patience with which my entire group has met our differing approaches. Yes, there’s been difficult conversations and hard-fought compromises, but not one flat-out argument. We’ve been blunt with each other, but we’ve apologised for poor phrasing and clarified rationales when we’ve need to. We’ve been looking out for each other in our own, very different, ways and we’ve always continued working.

While I’ve had a lot of experience working in and managing groups, this experience has helped me to consider more carefully how I want to approach this in the future. I’ve been reflecting on times when I’ve not been as constructive as I could have been and, alongside the experiences of this week, I’ve come up with the following guide:

• Before you request a change to a project, consider how important it is in the grand scheme of things. Is it a Must (major issue), Should (e.g. best practice) or Could (largely superficial or prettying).
• When requesting/suggesting a change:
• Be clear how important you feel it is and why, so you and the team can best discuss it.
• Only major issues should completely block a project moving forwards. Should and Could changes might get added to an appropriate workflow stack for later so priority tasks can be finished.
• If you want a change, offer a solution and rationale. If you don’t know the solution, say so and request some time (priority dependant) to find one!
• Keep feedback, rationales and solutions as simple as possible.
• Be aware of the pitfalls of certain approaches, but don’t make them a problem unless they actually are! You could end up down a rabbit hole you never needed to be down in the first place.

After jumping on and off video calls for most of the first morning, we decided to stay on a call throughout the day and it was a really great experience. I found it made me much better at asking a quick question when I was stuck, and I could get opinions on approaches or small additional changes immediately. We generally had cameras and mics off, so it wasn’t constant chatter, but we were all there in the background when we needed each other.

The only downside was that I accidentally made one of my teammates jump out of his skin a few times when I came back on mic after a period of silence! The workaround? When I unmute now the group gets an ascending ‘do, do, do, do’ or similar before I start speaking. It’s given us all a few laughs and me more joy that I should probably admit!

Finally, a huge thank you to the Milliways group for being wonderful humans through all of this. We’ve got a day left on Monday, followed by presentations on Tuesday. I can’t wait to show you what we’ve created. Wish us luck!