DEV Community: Bizimana Ibrahim

Week 5 at Task Force 5.0

Bizimana Ibrahim — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 09:40:46 +0000

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.”
Albert Einstein

The famous quote by Albert Einstein can pretty much sum up my journey at Task Force 5.0. It's been 5 weeks of continuous learning and each day I get introduced to new concepts that I was not aware of. So what was new this week? Which challenges did I face? And How did I overcome them? Here is my reflection:

This week, like every other week we had informative and interesting sessions. In soft skills, I learnt how to work effectively in self-organizing teams, and realized the most important thing is to trust each other in the team. This was helpful as in the Task Force we work as a self-organizing team. Design thinking was another new concept of how to create products that are relevant to the users. In this session, I learnt to never be self-referential, which is one of the most essential things as a developer.

This week’s biggest challenge came in technical skills sessions. Where we were introduced to TypeOrm. TypeScript ORM (object-relational mapper) library that makes it easy to link your TypeScript application up to a relational database. What was the challenge?
I installed the package following instructions from the documentation but the package was not working. I did some research on the internet, tried all the suggested solutions but to no avail. I asked my fellow interns and none of them was facing the same issue. This brought back the “5 whys” methodology we learnt the previous week. Probing myself the whys it led to the root cause which was the package was updated a couple of minutes ago and the reason it was working for others but not me it was because the new update caused some breaking changes and it was not indicated in the documentation. So the solution was downgrading to the previous version.

All in all, easy is boring and at Task Force we are always give some interesting challenges which makes it a fun and informative experience. it's unfortunate it's coming to an end but looking forward to the final week. Thank you for your time. See you on the next one.

A whole month at Task Force 5.0

Bizimana Ibrahim — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 09:24:14 +0000

In what feels like a blink of an eye it's already a month at Task Force. At the end of the first month usually is that point you are excited to get your first paycheck. But in my case, I am excited for the knowledge I have gained and the growth I have had in the past month both personally and professionally. Here is my reflection.

"Learning without reflection is a waste. Reflection without learning is dangerous"
Confucius

As Confucius said it's always best to reflect on what you have learnt but also learn from the mistakes you have made.

Understanding who I am and how my personality can affect the workplace was the first thing we did. And this is something I have been paying attention to in the past month trying to see areas of improvement. For instance, my communication skills, which we had also sessions to help improve. Team working has also improved as most assignments are done in teams. I got a lot of insights into presentation skills. But how about technical skills?

In the technical department, I have also gained a lot of knowledge in industry best practices such as Agile process, DevOps, continuous delivery and integration, project structure, to mention but a few. And this week I got challenged with Typescript which is JavaScript but with types. Remember, how I mentioned my communication skills got better? This is how I figured it out.

Asking for help is one of the instrumental things I have learnt so far. Knowing that no one expects you to know it all, and you can't know it all, has been a great asset in tackling the challenge I am facing with Typescript. I could not get a hold of when to use Typescript and this time instead of taking much time trying to just figure it out on my own, I asked for help from the facilitators, Sam and Twist who helped to understand and lead me to the right resources.

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
Soren Kierkegaard

Conclusively, A month can be perceived as a short time but if you look back and reflect it's enough time to make some meaningful improvements. I appreciate the opportunity offered by Awesomity Labs and Code Of Africa. Looking forward to the remainder of the Task Force. Thank you for giving it a read. I will keep you posted.

Icyumweru cya gatatu at TaskForce

Bizimana Ibrahim — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 09:14:35 +0000

You might be wondering what does the title mean? what does "Icyumweru cya gatatu" mean? Well it means "third week" in Kinyarwanda. So the title is “third week experience at TaskForce”. But why mix different languages? Why don't I just use English and make life easy? But to a Kinyarwanda only speaking person they might be wondering what does "at TaskForce"? They may also ask the same "why not use Kinyarwanda and make life easy?". This is the dilemma that arises when you communicate with people from different cultures. Which brings in the take of this week at TaskForce: Culture Awareness.

Cultural awareness is the understanding that our own culture differs from one individual and group to the next, and specifically from our target language.

What I learnt this week was the importance of self awareness being aware of who you are, and how your culture influences the way we interact and how we behave. Which is different from the way others are. And always be willing to learn other people's culture and respect it.

The biggest challenge this week was the Friday presentation. We had to come up with something special and working as a big team with different ideas was a bit challenge.

The way we worked on it was to chose a leader among ourselves. Making sure everyone has their ideas considered and making compromises where necessary. None was entitled to their opinion. The culture awareness and communication skills really helped a lot in that. And we were happy with the final presentation we made.

As a conclusion, differences and similarities can co-exist. We should always appreciate other people's culture. We can always find differences but we should focus on the similarities. I am really learning a lot of useful and interesting things at Taskforce. Can't wait for what's coming up next. Thank you for your time. See you on the next one.

WEEK 2 Experience at Taskforce 5.0

Bizimana Ibrahim — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 09:31:07 +0000

Oh, My, Time flies! I can't imagine it's already the end of my second week at Taskforce. Week two came in pretty quick, I missed the first day because of sickness but attended the remaining days of the week regardless of not being 100% fit. Was it a good idea to attend work without being at my 100? Was it worth it? Here is what I learned from that.

Having been out of work for 4 days just dealing with medication and resting it was obvious that I lost my flow and pace. But Taskforce is quite intense and challenging. How do I handle it?

The biggest challenge I faced was having to do two assignments on the same day; one of making integration pipelines and another of Codewars. I felt overwhelmed by the tasks at hand. The integration pipelines not working and having a number of Codewars challenges that I haven't done.

How I dealt with it was with something I learnt from our facilitator silke on day one of not sticking with a failing strategy for too long. So what I did was to prioritize and begin with the easiest task which I deemed to be Codewars and submit it on time. Then integration pipelines later.

A session with Hans, one of the co-founders of Code of Africa, regarding effective communication helped a lot with dealing with integration pipelines. We had to communicate with the facilitator(Yannick, a co-founder of Awesomity lab) to let him know of the difficulties we are facing and he really helped us a lot, which really encouraged us. How I ended up completing the task was to work as a team with a fellow intern who uses the same stack as me.

Lastly, demo Friday came, by then I have already gained the pace and got to experience my first. it was fun and interesting as ever, as it was hyped by my fellow interns. So was it worth it? Yes definitely. Thank you for giving it a read. See you on the next.

My first-week experience at a boot camp: Task-Force 5.0

Bizimana Ibrahim — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 09:12:10 +0000

Introduction.

Do you ever wonder what life is like in a boot camp at a cool tech company? Here is my take from my first-week experience.

First and foremost what is this task force? if you visit the Awesomity website you see that it is a joint effort between Awesomity and code of Africa “to develop a solid and talented pool of software developers and product designers right here in the heart of Africa. ” as per the website. what have I learnt so far? Let’s dive into it.

Communication

As a software developer the first think that comes in your mind when you hear the word boot camp it’s what programming language am I going to learn. Undermining the most pivot skill which is communication and this is an important lesson I learnt from our first challenge. The first challenge taught me that effective communication makes work a lot easier and moving on from a failing strategy can help to finish tasks in a timely manner. In task force they do not only give us technical skills but also soft skills which are as equally important since we won’t only be dealing with computers but also people.

Code Wars.

What I thought to be the biggest challenge of the week came as a coding challenge from code wars. We were supposed to do it as a team of two but me and my partner met a lot of roadblocks. We tried to find solutions among us as interns but to no avail. Forgetting they are brilliant software engineers next door from the code of Africa and Awesomity team. The way we tackled it was to ask for help. But in addition to that I am dedicating a couple of minutes a day to work on a challenge so that I can improve.

Agile Process.

We were introduced to agile process in software development and how to make user stories. We had to come up with the most viable product for a project of our choice and present it. And here came the biggest blow of the week I got really sick and couldn’t make it but my team had to adopt as that’s what agile is about and deliver the best even in my absence.

Conclusion

conclusively, my first-week was really interesting and fun. time flied fast I can’t imagine it’s been a week already and again it feels like we have been there for a long time because of the way were easily integrated in the team. Looking forward to another amazing week ahead