DEV Community: James Nyagatare

Taskforce a life-changing boot camp

James Nyagatare — Sun, 02 May 2021 15:17:49 +0000

It only takes two months of determined work with a right guide to master two new programming languages and land a job overseas. Yeah that's the task-force fellas with Code Of Africa and Awesomity Lab.

You all have been trying to land jobs or gain investors but you keep failing because you lack either experience or communication skills, believe in the task-force you will gain both at zero cost.

Joining the task-force I had a few skills both technically and professionally, during the bootcamp I gained a tremendous amount of skills, I just studied java and typescript from zero to mastery and built a number of secure APIs using both languages following all the best practices needed out there on the market.

We all know team communication is a key to success.Code Of Africa helped me with that, teaching me how to communicate using different platform(email, slack, wonder.me, miro...), working in teams to build solutions and self management leading to productivity. All these skills helped me out to land a job in Italy.

While working with Code Of Africa and Awesomity Lab you feel like you are in a family and this is the thing I appreciated the most.

The boot camp for me was a stone that killed two birds at a time. I really appreciate Code Of Africa and Awesomity Lab, I wish you all the best and thank you for the opportunity and experience.

Debugging and Brainstorming

James Nyagatare — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 14:58:32 +0000

Greetings,

We started this week with the plan of implementing the feedback Micheal gave us in the past demo, we divided the tasks and I was given the task of implementing the responsiveness of the challenge I tried my best I came up with the idea while implementing it I met a blocker I was not able to trigger the popup as it has been long without giving a try front-end tasks, my teammate Bienaime told me he may take it from where I am and be the lead of the implementation as I will keep doing my research.

It's been almost two hours without a hope of solution, I reached out to Yannick and connected us to HB to provide some help us, HB looked into it and connected us to Elie to help us out but still we don't get to the solution, yes we panicked thinking how we will be presenting non finished things but Bienaime figured out a way to present it to the client and in demo Micheal shared with us a way we can implement it and have it responsive which we later on implemented.

This week on wednesday we were also given the graduation project. It's really an interesting app, I have even thought about developing the same thing in December. It’s a meme app but this time it has some cool features. We took the advantage and set the project up and while starting the project we faced a problem on the backend where the social login is difficult to integrating it with both the front-end and the mobile but we came up with the idea of handling the authentication on the client-side and send the token to the backend.

The main takeaway of this week is to never give up on things when they get more complicated. It's better to approach experienced people to help you out.

Product Demonstration

James Nyagatare — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 06:06:27 +0000

Greetings,

My week at task-force went quite well, starting the week together with my fellow teammates we reviewed the WordPress work we were given to create a popup model for the client as everyone tried to implement the challenge in his own way, we then took the decision the one had to be presented to the client, we tried our best to inspect all the possible perspectives that may lead to a bad user experience resolved them then we thought everything was fine we thought we were ready for the demo with the client.

Things did not go as planned reaching in the demo while presenting to the client we found out the application was not responsive this taught a lesson before demonstrating to the client it's better if we take someone from another team or someone within us developers and pretend to be the client we do a demonstration to him or her then he or she gives feedback this will increase the quality of the app. We also received feedback from the client suggesting we should not use the plugins and suggested us to code everything from scratch, I am an engineer I took this as a good thing because I love challenging myself.

As we finished preparing for the demo on Monday I took my chances for the rest of the week to level up in java and I am proud of myself that I was able to create my first endpoints using servlets, tomcat server, and ArrayList.

Being a part of the task-force is one of the biggest opportunities I have ever had in this career I am upskilling both in technical and soft skills, I like the way I am being challenged, and I believe it’s transforming me into one of the best in this career.

Agile methodology and stress management

James Nyagatare — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 20:52:34 +0000

Greetings,

This week started way different from others we did not have the team building session as usual instead we started the week with a project management session having Joseph leading it, the session was really educational. Joseph worked us through software different project stages and how they may be prioritized in the software development lifecycle. We also get to know different methodologies that can be followed when developing software, we saw that agile methodology is the best over waterfall methodology as agile produces the minimum viable product through the use of scrum iterations. We also get to know more about the roles in agile projects like the PO, Scrum Master, and team members and how they contribute to the project. We also dived into agile stories, sprints, and key behaviors of the scrum team.

This week we were also blessed to have an interesting and fun session with Axel talking about stress and resilience, personally sharing the story of my most stressful moment where I was trying to finish up my university studies, and joining Andela at the same time made me think the way I used resilience to deal with that stressful moment and stood again towards my goals, Axel also gave us some hints on how we can train and practice resilience like creating stressful moments for ourselves in tough time settings to get to know how much things we can achieve in a given time. We also talked about resilience elements which was a good experience mainly with the connection part where we identified 25 people who are connected to us and identified who can be of help and whom I can help.

In technical skills, we upskilled WordPress this week where I enjoyed learning its beautiful features.

This week was relaxing, fun, educational, and interesting. It was a career-boosting week I really enjoyed it. I am looking forward to the next weeks

Successful Software Engineer Tricks

James Nyagatare — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 08:59:01 +0000

Greetings,

Another week down at task force, the week was fun, educational, and interesting.

We started the week with a team-building session, as usual, a session I personally enjoy not only it’s a warm-up session but also because it’s an opportunity to get to know better about my teammates in the task force.

Speaking of the team this week we organized ourselves to build teams that will be working on a client project for the coming two weeks while waiting for the project we focused on the technologies we will be using and learn more about them and I believe we will be able to deliver a high-quality product to the client.

This week I also received feedback from the Awesomity Lab team, telling me how I could improve in my codes of the past project (Wanderlust). I tried my best to implement all the feedback as I believe, Awesomity Lab team is trying its best to make me a sharp software engineer who follows all the best practices to deliver products of the best quality.

With the help of Blaise and Joseph, we all know what it takes to be a productive and healthy software engineer it is time management. In the session, Joseph explained what is time management and the reasons why it’s important, then Blaise worked us through different time management strategies, I now know that I have to identify the tasks I want to implement, prioritize them, know the time I am focused and productive then arrange those tasks due to that time and their priorities.

I can write a million words talking about how the week went at taskforce but what I can tell Awesomity Lab and Code Of Africa treat whoever they are working with, as a family member and I am looking forward to the coming weeks with them.

A month down...

James Nyagatare — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 06:44:46 +0000

Greetings,

It’s been a month at task-force, this week was as interesting as the past ones.

I gained a lot of experience and skills this week, starting the week with a team building session was fun, it was more like a warm up for the whole week. After a few, Lionel reached out to us (interns), telling us we will be working on projects of our preference. I was very excited because I took the opportunity and applied most of the skills I have gained in past weeks, me and my partner Issa we tried our best to find out the problems the community may be facing right away, we came up with two options which we later on used our critical thinking skills to decide the one we have to implement. After deciding the idea, we designed a sprint with stories of features to implement using the project management skills we gained in the last week then we started coding the features for the rest of the week.

This week, we talked about the do’s and don’ts in remote communication. I really enjoyed the session personally because most of the time I have been working remotely since I came in software engineering. I found there were mistakes without having a clue.

We have had an interesting session with Olaf teaching us about design thinking even though the whole team seemed not focused due to the ongoing projects but I really enjoyed the session, as a software engineer I have to put myself into the client’s shoes and use different personas to deliver solutions of the best quality and keep testing them.

In my career I have been looking for a challenging place to help me grow my career, I found it, it’s with Code Of Africa and Awesomity Lab. Looking forward to more challenges, experience and skills in the coming weeks.

Task force week three

James Nyagatare — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 07:54:38 +0000

Greetings,

Third week down at the task force, the week was fun, interesting and upskilling.

I understood more about project management tools alongside user stories and acceptance criteria. At the task force we are using jira, through the presentation of the task force team I understood that the project features must have a well defined sprint, epics, user stories and a clear acceptance criteria in order to manage big teams and satisfy our clients both in quantity and quality.

Speaking of the team I got a chance in this week to know the personality of the task force team as well as mine through the help of 16 personalities test, I know how each member may contribute on our team to become more productive. A productive team always has a team culture and each member must be a fit in that team culture. Thanks to Anja who worked us through team culture and cultural fit. I am looking forward to creating our team culture with my teammates.

It’s crucial for the a successful team to be having a high level of critical thinking, thanks to Olaf who taught us 5 why’s and paddle board which will help us to gather information, analyze them and come up with efficient solutions. Not only a high level of critical thinking but also strong communication between team members. I really enjoyed the Friday session with Anja, I took it as an introduction to remote communication and remote work. We did a number of exercises and used different platforms like wonder which made me feel like I was physically with the team. I am excited to keep learning more about remote workspace.

This week like past weeks was educational and fun. I am really excited for the coming weeks.

Task force week two

James Nyagatare — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 08:55:21 +0000

Greetings,

It’s been two weeks at task force. I finally started coding a todo app api at Awesomity Lab, well it’s not my first time with a todo app api but the language, the technology and framework they are all new, at first it’s been too challenging because I used to code in JavaScript with it’s framework called express, right now I switched to nestjs and I am using typescript, the secure language I am enjoying right now I am proud I am growing both technically and professionally.

Speaking of professionalism, I really enjoyed the sessions I had with Anja teaching us about intercultural(business) and non verbal communication, the good thing I really appreciate with Anja is that she let us make our research, personally this helps me because the things I researched on my own it’s really hard to forget them. You may be here reading this but you are questioning yourself but James what did you really learn? Well I now know that before you meet someone it’s advisable that you make a deep research about their culture, knowing more about his or her culture will improve the level of empathy while trying to communicate with them. I don’t think you want to attack someone at his or her first sight.

I didn’t know how powerful non verbal communication was, I did not know that the body language can mean something way different to what you are talking and that may influence the personnel you are communicating with, the takeaway from this is that I have to pay attention when I am using gestures because they may attack him or her which may result to the personnel thinking I am apathetic with them.

The second week was educational, challenging and productive. Task force has everything I have been searching to boost my career. Looking forward to the coming weeks.

Week one at Task-force

James Nyagatare — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 10:30:30 +0000

Greetings,

It's been a week at the task-force with Awesomity Lab and Code Of Africa. I learned a lot of valuable things with them and in this blog post I will be sharing the lessons I gained. I believe some days will remind me there were some days I didn't know things and it will motivate my eagerness towards things even bigger.

For the first day I was excited and curious about meeting new people and the team I was selected with, it was a really good experience to meet the guys. Later in that morning I learned a lot about my personal values, team values and code of Africa values together with Axel Kuhlmann. I understood for a team to be successful it needs to be having common values. In the afternoon I had an interesting session with Yannick and Sam working us through the git workflow We will be using at awesomity lab.

Day two was more technical. I did a number of algorithms and data structures, the exercise actually boosted my thinking capability towards solving a challenge. As a developer I understood I have to be looking at all perspectives that may crash the app I am developing and think about the efficient and effective solution.

Day three was about communication in general. It was really interesting because I believe communication is crucial in our day to day life. In the morning we got a chance to be reminded what communication is and how we can improve our communication skills with Hans Stoisser. In the afternoon Anja Schlösser gave us an interesting session about preparation and presentation. Later on we got a chance to present, I believe my presentation skills will improve as I do a lot of practices.

Day four and day five were educational, because I learnt about writing understandable clean codes with code-wars challenges and how I can containerize my app. I also understood that teamwork is key to success.

First week was both interesting and educational, I believe the boot-camp will boost both my skills and experience in software engineering career and day to day life.