DEV Community: Paradis Isimbi

Week 5 as a taskforce

Paradis Isimbi — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 06:35:15 +0000

Hello hello hello!!

Week 5 and week last of learning sessions has come to an end, so many things have happened, so many things I have learned, so many challenges I surpassed and so far being the best version of myself. 😊 I still remember the first day when Lionel said this boot camp will get harder each day, he was right.🤣

Fast forward, this week has been very fruitful especially the session with Thomas (the business simulation game) that session has taught me about different roles in a team, the importance of every individual part of it and how to work with everyone accordingly. It also gave me a glimpse of real working conditions on real life projects, this has helped to probably connect with who I’ll be or what I’ll be doing in the future.

The second interesting session was Friday morning’s brainstorming session, I didn’t know coming up with ideas was that hard🤣, anyhow Friday we were told that for the rest of the bootcamp we were goin to work on our own, on a project we were goin to think of. I think this is a very interesting thing since it’s our time now to use everything we learned through the way and challenge us in this final project. We’ll be able to see how far we came and how far we can go.

Briefly, this week was very fruitful, we practiced and had a glimpse of real working conditions and to me, this is what nourishes our minds to be greater. 😎

Week four as a taskforce

Paradis Isimbi — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 08:34:33 +0000

Hello again!!

As we wrap up week four, I’m amazed by how fast time can be😅. I remember day one of week one vividly and we’re already at the end of week four. Anyways, this week was interesting, as I said last week we are having sessions about things we usually need in real life and that is basically why task force is a mentoring program to me.

Monday started off with Lionel’s technical review of the implementation of the dashboard and I have to admit I was impressed. These whole tech sessions made me work closer to the developers, it taught me that we see things in different ways, how to closely take care of the details while reviewing their implementation because as I saw they are things they don’t catch real quick so that the whole implementation looks exactly like the mockup.

With the soft skills we had a session with Olaf about design thinking, where we learned about stages of design thinking and how they can impact the outcome of the project. We also learnt about the creation and use of personas, where you create a person with as much details as possible, I was amazed by how you find yourself thinking like that persona you just created and this helps to know who you are really creating for and adjust to their different needs.

We also had a session about Time management and how to be productive. In this session we learnt how to formulate our goals using the SMART technique, and immediately saw that this is already a step to completing effectively your goal.

Briefly, this week was interesting, we learned so many techniques that will help us be more professional and more focused to the product itself.

See you :)

Week 3 of the Task Force

Paradis Isimbi — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 08:39:36 +0000

Hi again!

Week 3 has come to an end in a not so happy but necessary way, all in all this has been a fruitful week.

Fast forward we learnt about best practices, My favorite was “Storytelling”, I heard stories are the most common way that humans make sense of the world, I need to make sure my designs connect with it’s users in the most complete possible way. This is what makes the user experience more enjoyable.

The most important though is “Minding the content”, sometimes when designing we tend to use data that is best looking for us, forgetting that the real content the user might input is different and this might mess up the whole designs, so we need to pay attention to it.

The following sessions where more centered to things we use in life. Stress management, Who doesn’t need to know how to cope with it? This session has enlightened me on techniques to use to stay motivated and manage how I react in situations where I am stressed. One good technique I’m thankful for is the “Letter to my future self” this had me thinking twice and I’ll surely remember it always.

Second session was Critical thinking, it was the most fun, with the help of cool exercises we learnt how to think out of the box, analyse certain situations to come up with so many questions that would help you look at it through different angles to come up with best solutions.

Briefly this week was interesting, we learned things we’ll use in our everyday life and this is what makes learning worth it.

See you next week :)

Week 2 as a taskforce

Paradis Isimbi — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 20:51:52 +0000

Hello there!

Here we are again, wrapping up the second week in style😎.
This week was more challenging from very awesome team games in soft skills sessions to tough individual technical assignments.

Monday started off with Yannick’s session, I was introduced to the developer’s world a bit through the session on git workflows, the whole process was new to me but it was interesting to learn some technicalities and how they affect the whole process in the end.

Tuesday was a more relaxed day, morning session was about values, it was interesting because we often don’t realize what we know about ourselves until we pause and reflect on it, that session was more a reflection and it was also nice getting to know more about the team and CoA’s values.

That was basically it for the soft and easy part of the week😂, what followed was more of a rollercoaster, as part of our weekly technical challenges we had to create mockups that match a project we had to come up with based on functionalities we were given, hilarious huh?🤣 Normally it’s the project first but this time nahh.

This was a challenge because it’s not the usual way we did it before, we didn’t even know were to start but we found ways, this has allowed me to think of a certain functionalities as a main part of the project’s success not just as an add ons.

Briefly this week was more intense, more challenging but again more fruitful. On a personal level I feel like I’m improving and I can’t wait to see what I still have in stores😅

And as always, see you next week. :)

Week 1 as a Task force

Paradis Isimbi — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 18:23:01 +0000

As we are ending the first week, I am happy with the improvements i am seeing so far. My very first take from soft skills is that the actual presentation takes less than 7% of the whole success of the presentation and this is something that was new to me. Second is I hadn't realized how much empathy can contribute to an effective communication, the session with Hans about communication shed more light to me about this matter.

Technical side, I learnt more about user stories and how helpful and impactful they are towards developing a good user interface by understanding things through the user’s perspective, I’ve also learnt how to formulate properly user stories, so that they can be more precise to the functionality itself. What was more of a challenge was completing the user story’s exercises and challenges in so little time but I managed to also put in a little bit more efforts.

See you next week :)