Working Backwards

It was a workshop day and the person who held the workshop will be our mentor till the end of the course. We will have sprints every two weeks and get our feedbacks as well.

We talked about what's good portfolio today but instead of him giving us guidelines or examples, we learnt to think it through ourselves by brainstorming and adding each others thoughts into it.
So, the method we used today was working backwards. We did not talked about portfolio straight away but instead, we shared our opinions about what would make a good portfolio, what kind of skills or abilities we would like to get at the end of course, what we would like to show in our portfolios and to do that, what we need to do.

Through the session today, I realised that I am not used to planning things in detail. I heard and read other people's plans and also what kind of skills they wanted to have.
Some of the most wanted skills were being good at communication not only being good at programming. So, to work better with other people, what can we do?
We can be open minded, listen carefully what other people say. Be respectful. We can give feedbacks to each others when working together and find out what we are good or bad at, maybe try to improve our weaknesses. We will be also working with people who are not developers or people don't have enough knowledge in tech as developers sometimes. So, it would be also great if we can explain technical things in easier way.

At the workshop, we were teamed up with about five people and exchanged our thoughts, made checklist and then shared those with whole members of bootcamp.
First, we chose three skills/abilities we wanted to have and made checklist that will help us to get those skillset.
These are I wanted to have and who I wanted to be.

1. A developer who grows constantly and have programming knowledge required for junior developer.
2. Experience working with TDD(Test Driven Development) and be comfortable with it.
3. A developer can think from user's perspective(+ Be a person that many people want to work with)

So for the first one, I wrote those.

• Have a time to review things I've newly learnt
• Try to write code with things I've learnt, make anything even for small feature or function.
• Record daily what I've learnt on my blog. Make it as a routine/habit.
• Stop procrastinating.
• Read more of official documents (This also will help me to learn English since my first language isn't English)
• Do clone coding (services or websites that I think that are interesting or things I like.)

For the second one,
I chose this because I tried to apply for dev jobs and I've asked if I have experiences in TDD which I don't yet.

• Learn about TDD.
• Learn about Jest.
• Try to write test code even for small part then gradually increase the amount of it.
• Write down what I've learnt, make my own document so that other people can also learn from it.

and for the last one,

• Read more books.
• Try to practice explaining technical things in easy way
• Learn good communication skills
• Make opportunities to work with many people not only programmers but possibly with designers, marketers and etc
• Ask for feedbacks and improve myself.
• Try to use lots of different services and see what's good or bad. See if there are anything that I can make them better. (Try to think it as an user)

These were what my team and I wrote but to continue working on it everyday, these might be too much. So we tried to make it as simple as possible and doable.

What I came up with at the end are these!

1. Review and record what I've learnt everyday(Mon-Fri) on my blog which is this where I am writing right now.
2. Write code using things I've learnt. Also do this course https://fullstackopen.com/ (try to do it one each day)
3. Make a plan for group project(gaining experience working with other people), Contribute to open source project!

First thing is what I must do, second and third are lists that I would like to do as much as possible. We will check these again at the next sprint and will revise plans when it's needed.

It was great time for me and I thought about my planning problem a lot and learnt how I can improve. I think I can make my own roadmap in this way as well. I can't wait till the next sprint and will try my best to do what I planned 😊