Cat from Space

Pre-commit git hooks Sometimes, we may need to run our services locally with a series of properties that we don’t want to accidentally commit to our repositories for being sensitive. Whilst looking for a solution to this problem, I came accross git’s hooks, and more particularly, pre-commit hooks. I know other people use them, for example, to ... Read More

As a new joiner in my company, I have been asked to do a little Java/Spring/Maven project based around making calls to an external API. Until now, I had never used Java, so although I knew the basics of what I had to do, it was all fairly new to me. It’s been a lot of trial an error, I have looked everywhere in the internet trying to find wha... Read More

There is light at the end of the tunnel. I must admit I was worried that I had done Makers at a particularly bad time for the tech industry. With the financial crisis developing in the country and lots of employees from well-known companies being sacked, I wasn’t sure the investment in time, effort and money was going to pay-off. And thus, I... Read More

The week after finishing the Makers Academy course, was dedicated to give us an intense introduction to job hunting in the unknown world of tech. First workshop: Tech test part 1 - Fundamentals (Design principles) In this workshop, we discussed the core principles of Object Oriented Programming that we hadn’t quite covered as such during the ... Read More

I can only say, this has been one of the most fascinating, enjoyable and utterly exhausting experiences of my life. I remember when we had our first day and we were setting some goals together about what we wanted to get out of the course. “I want to come out being more resilient and having learnt how to learn”, those were my main goals, and I... Read More

Welcome to the culmination of the last four months of the Makers Academy bootcamp. It feels like ages and at the same time, I don’t know where that time went. The objective of our last two weeks was to create an application from scratch, using our own idea and whatever tech stack we wanted. The previous week we had a short session in which we ... Read More

What was it like? In week’s nine retro, we covered what high quality code looked like: Easily Changeable • As simple as possible • Clear notation, comments • Principle of least astonishment, really complicated functions should be broken up. • Commits documenting our process • Keep classes loosely coupled Readable • Avoiding repeating yours... Read More

What was it like? During this week, we continued with our group projects. I had done what felt like a good amount of progress during the weekend, by adding security to the front and back-end as well as messages responsive to user input on the form fields. I enjoyed a lot working on it and was really proud of this as I was relatively certain n... Read More

What was it like? This week has been the BEST WEEK EVER. We had our second group project, and all of the students were feeling quite run down after the challenges of last week. Apparently, only four or five people had completed the weekend challenge (we could choose either making a page that displays the news from an API or do our Twitter cl... Read More

What was it like? This week, we have continued to learn JavaScript, focusing on retrieving information from API or a server and storing it. It has been a very hard week, in which most students have noticed a sudden increase in difficulty, from easy exercises where you were given the solution in case you wanted to check if yours was correct or... Read More

What was it like? Week six has been our first JavaScript week. Basically, we have moved from using Ruby for several months, a language that is extremely forgiving with its syntax(to the point it almost reads like English) and has a huge library of in-built methods to using a very different language, with a much more confusing and complex synt... Read More

Week five is over, and what a week it has been! I will start by saying that this week was our first group-project. An entire new experience for which I felt a mixture of excitement, curiosity and insecurity. My time at uni had taught me that group-projects could make for a very enjoyable time or a quite a miserable one, depending, mainly, on ... Read More

This week has been SO much fun. I didn’t think I would enjoy it so much after having a bit of a low week last week, but I am loving seeing how we can now build a project from scratch (which doesn’t mean we know how to build good projects, but we only need some more time). This week the contents were given again in the form of some text, exerc... Read More

What was it like? This third week was the first week we were meant to be working from home. I must admit that the communication regarding this point wasn’t very clear, as we were told there were only two possibilities, hybrid course (two weeks in two weeks remote per month) or fully remote. When we arrived on the first day, they encouraged us t... Read More

What was it like? I cannot believe the second week is already gone, it feels like it was yesterday when had the introductory day!. This week has felt relatively similar to the first one. We have carried on doing some exercises about testing several classes that interact together, as well as how to create doubles to be able to test each class o... Read More

After writing a very long post about my first day and what my first week was like at Makers Academy, I wanted to write a last one about the things I learnt. I know what you are thinking and yes, it’s a lot of writing for only the first week week, and my intention was to make only one post, but I wrote a lot and ended up having to do three differ... Read More

After writing a very long post about my first day at Makers Academy, it’s time to do a bit of introspection and reflect about all that has happened during this intense first week. Although we had the possibility of doing the course remotely (which would have been quite handy since I don’t reside in London), I decided to go on-site for at leas... Read More

Now that I have finished the first week of the course, I can say that I am certainly enjoying it as much (or even more) as I was expecting. I have to admit the first day I woke up after not much sleep, and the fifty minutes walking commute to the premises in the very busy London streets while carrying a heavy rucksack wasn’t a piece of cake e... Read More

A couple of years back the idea of a career change started to develop within me, but I wasn’t too sure of how to do this. Since being a kid, I have been taught to follow a clear and structured guide of how to become a productive adult: Go to Primary school, go to High school, finish a degree at University, get as best grades as you can in all ... Read More

This is part of the content I learned during my first week of the Makers Academy Pre-course, and as such, writing this posts are a way of reviewing what I have learnt and hopefully helping other people which are also trying to get into the tech industry. Close your eyes and imagine living in a videogame. You can save whenever you want and kee... Read More

This is part of the content I learned during my first week of the Makers Academy Pre-course, and as such, writing this posts are a way of reviewing what I have learnt and hopefully helping other people which are also trying to get into the tech industry. Streams and pipelines A basic concept in programming is what we call streams, which refe... Read More

This has been my “little” summer project. Since moving in with my partner to a new flat in January, the empty wall in the living room had been giving me lots of ideas. I wanted to paint something, to make it a home with personality. Then, I saw some fantastic art from Trimcoast and fell in love with it. I have always liked LOTR a lot, not onl... Read More

This is part of the content I learned during my first week of the Makers Academy Pre-course, and as such, writing this posts are a way of reviewing what I have learnt and hopefully helping other people which are also trying to get into the tech industry. Ever saw a movie where someone that looked quite nerdy was getting a computer to do what ... Read More

Are you determined to learn to program but not very sure of where to start? It’s probably one of the most common feelings in people that are interested in tech but don’t have any previous experience. I found myself feeling very lost when I started doing this transition. There are thousands and thousands of resources out there, some of them yo... Read More

Are you considering studying veterinary medicine but you are not sure it is for you? After a few years in practice and always getting the same comments when I told friends I was a vet (“How sweet, you get to cuddle with puppies and kitties all day!”), I have realised that the mental image people have about what veterinary surgeons actually do... Read More

So I left my job and decided to take some time off. But because I am a bit of a control freak, I kept checking the job adverts and found one that really caught my eye. They offered 20 minutes consultations. “20 minutes??? That must feel like an eternity!” I told myself, after having worked for two years on 10 minutes consultations, which had m... Read More

Once I got convinced by my GP to be signed off, I was initially so for a couple of weeks, and those were two weeks I spent extremely anxious. I wondered how my colleagues would be managing without me, what they would all think of me (I thought they probably hated me for with lots of extra work) and of how much I dreaded going back. Despite my l... Read More

After reaching the bottom of that deep hole my life had turned into, I decided it was about time to do something about it. One of those days I spoke about what I was going through with some of my colleagues and found out they had been through something similar, that is how our open, honest and safe conversation started. I couldn’t be more grate... Read More

This is quite a long post divided in several chapters, so if you are looking to read the whole thing in one go, please go to the toilet first, get a cup of coffee and sit down in a comfy place before starting to read :) My story started as a kid that, like many other kids, loved animals. Thus, I had always wanted to become a vet to be able to h... Read More

Hello you. Yes, you, wherever and whenever you are reading this post, I would like to thank you for being here, for reading about another human being’s thoughts, fears, dreams, challenges and ideas. This blog started as a way of documenting what has often felt like a crazy and overwhelming event in my life, the decision to make a career chang... Read More