DEV Community: CYIMANA Faisal

My last week in Task-Force4.0.

CYIMANA Faisal — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 17:55:20 +0000

How do you feel when you achieved your goals? I guess to Wow to yourselves. Yeah, that is what happened to me on the 3rd of December 2021 Friday, I was in shock at how amazingly I and my team did present our final work to the rest of the teams both at COA(Code Of Africa) and Awesomity Lab.

As always, not the whole weekdays was as Friday was. especially Wednesday on 1st December was the day everyone in the team panicked to the extent we started losing hope as a team but trust me with all we can we managed to work together and come up with the solution that fits our end product. The problem we had was to come up with the solution of deploying our backend application by containerizing the application as well as setting up the CI/CD pipeline that will help us to deploy the app automatically without us going back to the server to add additional configuration. Now you can imagine how hard and amazing this was.

In the middle of the journey I mean in week 4, I was asked to provide a quote that I like and I replied with this "I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"(Vidiu Platon) Okay now everyone is saying that I am hash but this is of nothing to being strict or hashy. Ohhhhh poor me because in that last week I had to defend my quote by doing exactly what it means in software development and I did it.

What can I say if I am asked what has changed since I joined the program both personally and professionally? my answer to this question is that personally, I learned what it means to be me and what being me means to all the surrounding environment and professionally I have gained skills that will positively impact my career and make me stand out in this industry of software development.
I would like to conclude by thanking everyone who's efforts were invested in this program by helping us to grow and learn for a better future. Thanks again

My fifth week doing task force.

CYIMANA Faisal — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 05:05:03 +0000

Being on time is the best thing you can do as a software developer. Most of the time you will find yourself having many things on the table here I mean many tasks that are on deadlines and have to be done before the deadline. Not only this week's experience was to learn how to manage time but also we learned how to test and document your software.

Let's start by covering the software testing and documentation part, you might be asking yourselves why do we document software and why do we have to write a test that runs against our software. Every professional software development company, you might join will require you to have skills in testing and documentation but the documentation I am talking about here is the API documentation if you are in the back-end. there is more than one tool on the market you can use to document your API such as Postman, Swagger.

Testing your code will prevent you from deploying codes that have errors in them, and this will ensure the clients or the users of your application are having the best experience because they are using the application that has been tested before being shipped to them. There are many reasons to test your App. Documenting your app helps your team and other stakeholders to have Intel of what your application does by describing the inputs and output.

Last but not least let talk about time management. getting to know what to do first and what to do last is the best practice of time management this practice is called prioritizing tasks. and also consider knowing what is expected of you. I mean knowing what the client is expecting from you helps in allocating tasks and starting working on them. to conclude testing and documentation should not miss in your software development process.

Stress in software development industry.

CYIMANA Faisal — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 07:45:45 +0000

Hello folks,
Hopefully, everything went well this last week! As I promised I will be sharing my every-week experience in TaskForce at Awesomity and codeOfAfrica. This week was not easy at all but after all, it was worth it.

I know many of you guys might have been through what I have been through this week and you managed to get away from it gracefully. So guys this week which were my week4 I was in a team of 4 developers and we were tasked to set up the project structure and implement all the endpoints by the end of Friday and it was a stressful week for us as setting up a project is not an easy task.

The good thing is that we had a session about stress management and all the things we did learn in that session helped me to cope up with the stress I had this week it was really a good session to have.

The good part about my team is that we managed to 4devide the task into parts and we had to take tasks one by one and each task was allocated to one team member. this approach we had in the team was the one that helped us to deliver and join the demo with working features.

There is one thing I have learned this week. That one thing is to prioritize the tasks. Yeah prioritizing your tasks will help you meet the customer's needs because you will be hitting on the points that are needed compared to other features. I am saying this because the task I had this week was to work on the authentication of the project we were working on and I had to first look at the features that are needed most and to see which feature depends on what feature.

My week three experience as an intern at TaskForce4.0

CYIMANA Faisal — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 04:59:02 +0000

Introduction

I wish I had had such an experience before back in 2017. and you must be asking yourselves why I said this? back in 2017 was the year I truly focused on practicing software development. So guys in this article I will talk about entity relationship diagram and team culture as well as communication.

Yeah being a back-end developer is not an easy task if you don't have a team and a good working environment such as the one at Codeofafrica and Awesomity lab. In 2017 I used to learn something from the internet and think of the project to implement and all I could do was to go straight and start coding the project but this is a hell of time-wasting. during the development, I could come across my excitement and start doing things I never have done like implementing meaningless features, repeating myself over and over, Ohhhhh poor boy.

Having a better understanding of the project is the primary need before you start working on any project. After event storming our project, we ended up with the diagram commonly known as an entity-relationship diagram that defines the entities, attributes of each entity, types of each attribute, and relationships among entities. this at the end is what we call the data center of the project.

People have different cultures and different behaviors from which in a blick of an eye someone's behavior can ruin the team. So it is good to have a common culture, shared values within the team to better drive the team toward victory. the fact that at Taskforce we don't only code and do more stuff of software development, we do also engage in team culture building to learn and keep good spirits in the team. This was the fun part of this week.

My second week in taskforce4.0

CYIMANA Faisal — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 07:36:26 +0000

Being a software developer requires you to be very responsible for your tasks and to keep the team engaged. My second week in the task force was quite intensive but on top of that, it was very productive.

In this week we have learned GIT and what it means for teams to collaborate on the same project and keep track of the changes being made.

Not only that we have learned git but also we have learned how to use git productively and efficiently. We have been introduced to different gitwork flows that software development teams can use to drive projects towards achieving goals. and also git is not enough alone but when combined with other third-party software providers such as Github and Gitlab you can make the work easy for the team and other departments like the operations department.

With CI/CI pipeline setup for the project, you can achieve much more where your project has to go through different stages for the features being developed to be considered ready for production. this concept of CI/CD pipeline helps the process to be automated so that the tests and containerization process can be automated. This whole process is what we call the DEVOPS process.

We have also learned the concept of software documentation. where we have seen that documenting your software is important not only for you but for every stakeholder involved.
Overall this week was amazing and also educative. Being in a team that follows best practices is much more important because you have the workflows each and everyone in the team is knowledgeable of these practices.

I would like to conclude by saying that every software development company should adopt these best practices because they are time-saving and professional as well.

My first week in Taskforce 4.0 at CodeofAfrica and Awesomity lab.

CYIMANA Faisal — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 21:22:55 +0000

Introduction

I know this time you are asking yourselves the same question I asked myself the first time when I heard about taskforce Bootcamp. To know what Taskforce is? I suggest you go through the Awesomity website. Awesomity.rw. But really Taskforce "It’s more like a movement, an evolution born out of the need to create talent where it was previously thought not to exist. The Task Force is Awesomity’s effort to develop a solid and talented pool of software developers and product designers right here in the heart of Africa." (Awesomity, N.A). In this post we will look at what it is like to be a taskforce intern, What do you get from the taskforce, and the team at Awesomity as well as the CodeofAfrica team.

what it is like to be a taskforce intern?

So far my first week has been good in terms of skills development, team collaboration, as well as hanging out with the team from CodeOfAfrica and Awesomity. Being a taskforce participant the first thing to learn is to know your team, second is to be responsible. So far I can tell that being a taskforce participant you are treated as human not as a tool they understand your weakness and you get to work with the team to turn your weaknesses into valuable strengths that can help your team to grow and achieve the goals. I can't lie I have been into different teams playing the role of software developers but I haven't seen an enjoyable environment that helps you to be productive as the one from taskforce. Once Stephen Covey said, "Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important." For me being in a taskforce Bootcamp is important and I wish everyone who is willing to learn and develop as well can attend the program.

What do you get from attending taskforce?

I know getting a job is the first thing that comes to the minds of developers attending boot camps but that is really fine. at taskforce, you don't get to be considered as a potential developer when it comes to hiring but on top of that, you learn soft skills from which every developer must have on top of their CVs. My first-week experience has proved to me that if you can't integrate with your team you are of no value to the team because you can't help the team move forward. So being able to communicate proactively and efficiently is the key to the team. not only that you get to learn these soft skills but you get to learn the best practices for remote work as a software engineer. I haven't had much experience so far but keep checking my posts I will be documenting my journey all the way long.

CodeofAfrica and Awesomity team

You must be thinking that I am crazy but it is worth it to share with you the experience I had on my first Friday hanging out with both teams. It was amazing, fun, and human-friendly. People from there, are flexible, open to questions, and the fact that they put away all the stress from work and play games is amazing.

I would like to conclude by saying that my first week was awesome and enjoyable. I can't wait to share with you guys the next weeks to come stay tuned.