Sixth week at Makers Academy

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 syntax and some new rules.

The week in general wasn’t particularly challenging, and I went through the exercises with relative ease. That was until I got to the chapter of working with GitHub API. I was comforted to see that it was not just me, my mentor had warned me about that particular point of the week and most people struggled a lot with these exercises as well, to the point of us asking for a workshop on how to navigate them. It was funny to see how the coach found some incongruences on the contents that might have been the root of all our headaches and frustrations.

Emotional intelligence workshop

The emotional intelligence workshop for this week consisted on a “personality types” workshop.

In comparison to the previous ones, I found this one way less interesting and useful. As a good friend pointed out, it also started with a “It’s not good to make assumptions about people”, to be followed by exercises in which we made a lot of assumptions about the people that belonged to those four personality groups. It all that looked very black and white to me and not at all helpful.

After that, the same friend from the course suggested me to do the 16 personality test and I can’t believe how called I felt when I got the “Advocate” : https://www.16personalities.com/infj-personality. I could see all my flaws and “gifts” from an objective perspective (that is to say, written somewhere by someone else), and I felt somewhat relieved as it even sounded like I was a good person that cares for and values others and wants to make a difference in the world. While growing up, I had been told repeatedly that I was a selfish person by some members of my family, to the point that I kept believing that was true, and is something I still haven’t managed to get rid off.

I want to make clear that none of these tests have any scientific base, and they are mainly for fun or out of interest, but there’s nothing saying you have to live by what they say. They may though, as it was my case, help put some things into perspective.

When I spoke to my mentor a few days later, she mentioned that in her group, there were people that got really upset with that workshop, and it showed that if you didn’t have much EQ at the time, it would probably help everyone be more mindful of the fact that people are very different and that sometimes we need to adjust the way we communicate with someone and not take things so personally, trying to be mindful of others potential backgrounds and experiences.

Retrospective

The retrospective this week had quite a fun tune to it. Most people seemed to be missing working with the easy Ruby syntax, like some of the “Ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby, ahhhhhhhh” comments reflected.

Mentoring sessions

I also had a really nice chat with my mentor about how things were going. I really appreciate someone taking the time to talk to us every week and help with the difficulties we might be finding during the course or give us advice on what to do or not to do. I am aware it must be quite a bit of effort.

She suggested us to book a “code review” as soon as we could. Makers offers these as a practice for interviews and generally also to improve our code and make sure we follow best practices. I will write more about it after I do it next week!

What did I learn this week?

I have realised I can learn the basics of a new programming language in a short period of time. I have learnt the basic syntax of JavaScript and some of the differences it has with other languages like Ruby or Python.

I have proved myself that I am able to make the same project we did last week on Ruby, on a language I have just learnt like JavaScript. It took quite a lot of googling-up things, but I managed it.

I have continued to care for my wellbeing, been fairly active and eaten healthy. My sleeping patterns continue to be a bit all over the place, but I have gone to bed and waken -up at a similar time every day and tried to maintain a good sleep-hygiene.

Meditating in the mornings helps, and this week we have had a short talk about self-care and wild-writing in the mornings before the meditation. I tried the suggested wild-writing techniques and they helped me put into pen and paper how I was feeling at the time.

It has been a very nice week and I am looking forward to the next one and to learning some more JavaScript!