Third week at Makers Academy

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 to go to the office as much as we wanted. I already had all the tickets and had arranged it to stay with a friend for the weeks I had been originally told, so I decided to go ahead with the initial plan and go back home.

It sounds odd, but one of the things I have missed the most during this week has been seeing my course mates at the office and being able to work together in person. As much as I am loving being in my own place with my partner, I have been feeling slightly disconnected from the course and all the people involved.

It was especially hard when I got to the middle of the week. On Wednesday, we had our EQ workshop about empathy. I loved it and found it super interesting, but it also exhausted me emotionally. There was an exercise in which our coach asked for people to raise their hands if this or that had happened to them, in order to prove that the more common points we could find with someone else, the easier it was to empathise. She asked who had been bullied, who had a relative whose illness had affected their lives considerably, and so on. I raised my hand for pretty much all of them and felt quite sad afterwards. We also did an exercise in which we were paired and asked to speak for 3 to 5 minutes straight without any interruptions, as we were told the most valuable gift we had to give someone was our full attention and being fully listened to is not an experience we live frequently. I was in a group with two really nice people, and it was beautiful to watch someone talk about how they were feeling without interruptions.

After that, I offered myself as a “guinea pig” for interviewing a new coach. Nobody else had volunteered, and although I did not feel like I had anything in particular I needed help with, I decided to try as it would be a bit sad if they didn’t manage to get anyone to do it. It was not the best of ideas when I went to the potential new coach and said “I don’t understand databases!”. I did understand some of it, but I was hoping for a clearer explanation of how much we needed to understand all the connections and parameters we used in the code, as in the contents it wasn’t very clear what or why they were doing it. I don’t think he appreciated such a broad and non-specific question, and he asked for some of my code to look at. The only unfinished one I had was an exercise I was midway through, I had attempted on my own unsuccessfully and was in the middle of watching the video on how to do it, so it didn’t make any sense at all at that time. He looked at it and mentioned he didn’t really know Ruby, but to go and google the error I was getting (“Undefined method id”). I knew I wouldn’t find anything, as I was vaguely aware of what was going on. First of all, you don’t give an element in a table an “id” value, it generates automatically. So I deleted the part of my code with the id and he said that was a very bad idea. In summary, it ended up being a not very satisfactory or enjoyable experience for either of us, and I felt quite guilty he ended up getting nervous due to my questions. But then I checked with one of our coaches and said that was totally fine, that they wanted to see how he did in a real life coaching situation, whichever that was.

After that busy morning and afternoon, I found myself being mentally and emotionally exhausted, and I was only able to pair for an hour or so before I had to stop. I don’t think I had taken into account where my social limits (specially over video-call) were, and I needed an evening alone at home and have a rest of pairing the following day to get back into track. Hopefully, this time, I will have learnt the lesson!

In general, pairing this week was odd. Nobody seemed particularly keen on pairing since most of the contents were given through videos, so it was very difficult to keep the flow of pairing when we had to stop every few minutes to watch something. I have missed a good pairing session over a debugging exercise.

The retrospective on Friday let everyone know that the general mood was lower than it had been. There were many negative comments about the way the contents for the week had been delivered and not so many good ones about positive experiences like pairing. I was kind of glad it was not only me feeling that way.

The rest of the week went by uneventfully and I had a fantastic weekend in which I went out to a stand up comedy and singing night about a girl with vaginismus (it was awesome, not for the girl of course, but she turned her problem into a fun and educational speech). I also participated in a carnival parade wearing an elephant puppet as part of my work with the circus (not even kidding), I still can’t believe I get paid for having fun! I also spent some time working on our weekend challenge from Makers, the shop manager, where we were given some user stories had to TDD the repositories and an application class, while working with a database.

What did I learn?

This week was dedicated to learn how to work with databases. We used the PG gem to connect to databases we were storing locally and how to incorporate methods in our Ruby classes which would send an SQL query to our database and get a response, this would enable us to retrieve data as well as create, delete or modify it from our program. All of this was integrated with our previous knowledge of TDD, in that we still had to make tests for every method in our classes to make sure everything worked as it was meant to.

It was quite an interesting week in terms of contents, although the way these contents were given to us was different from the previous weeks. Many of the students found it very difficult to get around having to watch very long videos explaining how to do things rather than read a written explanation and try to do it ourselves, and only watching the solution video if we couldn’t get the solution right. This plus the very repetitive exercises meant that I ended up with less motivation some of the previous weeks, but I still managed to finish the week with a good feeling, specially after attempting the weekend solo project and finishing it.

I can see how week after week we add new building blocks and how all the contents are coming together and it is quite fascinating. I am looking forward to being able to build programs from scratch! I feel like I have learnt a lot in these last three weeks and I am much closer to becoming a software developer. I also think I have slightly neglected my wellbeing during the past week, and it is something I will need to pay more attention too over the remaining couple of months. It is all part of the learning process!