Makers has been simultaneously one of the most fun and challenging things that I have undertaken. It is a fairly unique learning environment, where there is a strong emphasis on learning by doing and Googling, as well as learning from your peers (from whom I have picked up a huge amount!). Although there are two, albeit very informative and useful, lectures a day, where the key concepts are covered, the bulk of our time is spent working on the weekly projects in pairs. Our weekly projects have ranged from building the Boris Bikes software system, to building a clone of Yelp!. I do believe that learning by doing is the best way to really get to grips with something, but it is hard not to feel completely swamped at times, especially when you feel like you are so far out of your depth that you don’t even know where to start!

On the plus side, I feel like there are particular areas in which I feel some real tangible improvements. I think one of the best things that I have got out of Makers is attention to detail and patience, especially with regards to learning to read error messages. I know that sounds silly, but at the beginning this was the part I struggled with most. When there were bugs in the programme, or my RSpec test failed, I would try and fix the problem without looking at the hints that the computer was giving me. Computers are great at telling you exactly what the problem is if you take time to read and understand it. Having the patience and understanding to decipher the error messages is a skill I’m still working on, but one that I am definitely getting better at. Oh, and also, sometimes all it requires is a restart. There have been a few too many moments when I have had an unusual and unexpected error message, and tried to ask around if anyone could fix it, only to be fixed in about 30 seconds by Alex simply refreshing or restarting the laptop!

The pace of learning has not stopped accelerating and it’s often hard to catch a moment to go over and revise what I have learnt. When I do have time to rewatch the screencasts from the lectures it is amazing how much more sense things make a second time round, especially after having spent some time using the technology. Ideally I think it was be helpful to try and build a little side project app that employs the use of the technologies that we are learning that week, but it is often hard to find the time. In week 7, Nikesh and I started a little side project to try and get to grips with using APIs. We used a recipe searcing API from the website Yummly. Now we understand how to access the data, we are looking at ways to migrate the project on to Rails with some added functionality.

Although it can be hard to find time to go over and revise the week’s project, Friday is test day and that often means being set a test that mirrors what we have learnt that week. One of my favourite challenges was building a Twitter clone using databases and Postgres. During that week we had been building a bookmark manager website, which is built in a manner not dissimilar to Twitter. I found that challenge so incredibly useful for deepening my understanding of everything covered that week.

A really great initiative that Makers have just introduced is mentoring. Makers alumni who are currently working as junior developers come in some evenings and help us with essentially whatever we would like to go over. My mentor, Margo, who is a Rails developer at Mint Digital, came in to Makers last Wednesday evening and showed us a Rails project she has been working on, tools she uses for debugging, and how she uses Github in the working world. It was really awesome to be able to recognise some similar features that we had in our own apps and to hear her about her Makers journey. She had a pretty impressive front-end Twitter clone…got to get to work on mine!

Don’t worry guys, it’s not all work and no play. As in all good tech environments, I’ve had my fair share of time on the table tennis table. Last Thursday, the office on the floor below us had a summer party and invited us all. They threw a great party! We’ve also had some pretty awesome lunchtime talks from the likes of Open Table, Compare the Market and Softwire. Tim Perry from Softwire spoke to us about the importance of open-source, a really interesting topic on which I hope to write a blog post in the near future…

Hannah