GA WDI: Week Seven & Eight

1 Jul, 2018 | Code, Learning

The second half of GA WDI has involved building on the fundamentals from the first half and stretching our skills with bigger, more professional projects.

Git

We have been using Git throughout the course as our version control system. Only in this last week have we introduced multiple branches with several people working on a group project. This has caused some stress-inducing moments and a whole lot of ‘omg none of it is working anymore’ drama.

With a bit of practice though, Git has fallen nicely into my software development workflow. I have found Git to be an incredibly powerful tool and it was invaluable in our third project.

git fear

Project 3

Our third project was a group task to build a full-stack web app, built with a back-end API and Angular on the front-end.

In my pair, we built Karma Community, a web-app that allows users to request favours of their local community, that people can in turn volunteer to do. Each favour is worth a certain amount of Karma Coins  (see what we did there) which they can, in turn, spend on their own favours. Think of it as an incentivised volunteering app.

karma community demonstration

Some particularly fun and challenging bits to work on where:

  • Creating the favour status, volunteer choice and verification logic
  • Working with the Twilio API to send status notifications to users
  • Using the Google Phone Lib for mobile phone validation (this post was so useful)

We presented our project to our classmates (with a live status text demonstration!) and received really good feedback from them and our instructor. You can see more details about the project on Github.

Outcomes

As our course comes towards its end, we are spending more time with the outcomes team. This work involves:

  • CV workshop
  • Personal elevator pitch and personal branding
  • Portfolio website design
  • Networking at meetups

At times during the course, you almost forget that the culmination of this training is to get a job as a software developer. I’m really looking forward to finalising these pieces so I can attack the job search with as much energy as possible.

If anyone knows of any great tech teams who are hiring junior developers, please let me know.

The next 3 weeks is the climax of the course, with the final 2 weeks of the curriculum and our last individual project. As always, I’ll be updating on Twitter and sharing on here.


You can see the other posts from this series here:

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