Graduation
Tags: Makersacademy, Makers

Final Project, Demo Day and Celebrations

12 weeks, 58 days, ~ 435 hours later and I have officially graduated Makers Bootcamp!

It’s been a whirlwind and it’s gone so fast. I can confidently say I am a better developer than when I started (admittedly the bar was pretty low). I have learnt so much over the past 12 weeks and not just the syntax and technical aspects of coding but also about learning and problem solving more generally as well as what it means to work in a development team and all the skills that come with it.

Whilst there has been the occasional tear and cross word directed at my computer (seriously I swear it just does it’s own thing sometimes), I have thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience and this is just the start. I’m sad to leave the Makers world but looking forward to entering the world of DWP fully and starting placement.

The final week of Makers was a fitting end to the bootcamp as a whole. It included frustrating bugs, coding victories and culminated in a chance to show off everything we’ve learnt in demo day.

Monday and we were straight back into working on our project. The good news was that the successes of Friday meant we were able to update user credits and process payments successfully now. All that was left to do was actually charge them for features. Pleasingly, this turned out to be fairly straightforward and after I had written a couple of subprograms and functions to check balance and deduct credits we were flying.

Tuesday we planned to do a feature freeze, meaning by the end of the day we would not be adding any new features and simply refactoring, tidying and fixing any small bugs in our existing ones. Happily we were already mostly at this stage with the final few features being finished off during the day. By the end of the day we had merged all the features but we still had plenty of work to do in formatting screens, refactoring subprograms and generally tidying up the program.

I spent the later part of the day, moving all our features into their own subprograms to allow separation of concern within our code and make the whole system easier to navigate and maintain. I was a bit wary about this task, in theory I could simply move all the relevant logic, screens and variables over and link them by calling the appropriate sub-program. However, as with anything in coding, there was the chance that this would simply break the whole thing and leave us with a big mess of non-functional code. So I moved onto a new git branch, worst case scenario, we would abandon the endeavour and leave our messy but functional spaghetti code as it was.

To my pleasant surprise, and perhaps a good demonstration of my learning development, I managed to successfully move all features to their own sub-programs with relative ease. After fixing the odd formatting bug, everything worked. I had substantially cleaned up our code, massively increased readability, making everything easier to maintain and managed not to break anything in the process. Proof that I am actually at least a semi-competent developer by week 12 of the bootcamp.

Wednesday morning was spent with us all frantically fixing small formatting issues and small bugs. As if spring cleaning, we scrubbed and dusted our code, making it bright and shiny and ready for presentation.

Finally finished with the code, we took a well deserved break and then set to work on preparing our presentation for demo day on Friday. We filmed our programming running, demonstrating all the main features, showing off all we had accomplished. Seeing it all there, working and functional we realised just how much we had done. So much in fact, we had to pick and choose which elements to show off in the video to ensure we kept to a reasonable timeframe.

Thursday and the pace of the week had dramatically changed. Suddenly we had time and space, we could relax. We ran through our video, assigning parts for each of us to describe and demonstrate in the presentation. After a successful practice session with our coach, we applied some feedback and took a well deserved early finish to the day, we had certainly earned it.

Finally the final day was here, a time to celebrate our achievements and reflect on the bootcamp as a whole. We spent the morning polishing up our presentation again, making sure we were ready to present to DWP colleagues, Makers coaches, the other group and any friends and family we had invited to our demo day.

The presentation was a success. Whilst it did feel a bit like a school show and tell, I embraced the occasion and proudly showed off our project. Our audience were polite, asking questions, complimenting sections and generally impressed by our work. The other group had also created a wonderful project and it was nice to see how they had adapted and built on our original codebase. We had all smashed it.

The week ended with celebration and some online games with the cohort. Just 12 weeks ago we met; a bunch of amateur coders with only a vague idea about what we had signed up for. Next week we would start a placement, a group of friends and colleagues, semi-competent apprentice software engineers with a slightly less vague idea about what we have signed up for.