DEV Community

Cam Bui for Our Time For Tech

Posted on

7 1

I am a CodeCollab fellow with Our Time for Tech

I’m a bootcamp graduate and CodeCollab fellow with Our Time for Tech, a coding initiative that empowers women transitioning into tech after former careers.

Over the next 3 months, I will collaborate with a team of 5 early-career devs and 2 senior engineers on one of the biggest projects I’ve worked on yet! We plan to share our MVP with a community demo in late May. Until then, follow along on my journey with this blog.

Why I joined as a bootcamp graduate

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." – Helen Keller

My time with Rithm School taught me to appreciate the art of collaboration. While learning by oneself is an essential skill, discussing code with peers catalyzed my learning in ways I didn’t expect.

The learning intensified when we started working on a community partner’s live codebase! There are so many aspects to developing code, like learning to communicate effectively about architectural choices and learning how to (re-)prioritize with moving targets, that are introduced with a team.

Real-world projects are built as a team.

Teamwork is a skill set that offers endless avenues for refinement and learning.

As I prepare for my first role in tech, I looked for ways to keep refining my skill sets. I’m so glad to come across Our Time for Tech and the CodeCollab track.

What I look forward to with CodeCollab

Our Time for Tech was founded by Arit Amana, a software engineer with a non-tech former career. She has designed this program for career changers who understands the importance of sustained mentorship and real world projects for breaking into the tech space.

Some of Code Collab’s goals for new developers:

  • Improve collaboration skills while building software with a team
  • Learning how to interpret client needs, manage requirements, and implement projects to meet those needs
  • Encouragement to stretch and grow beyond current tech stacks and skill sets
  • Structured mentorship for junior devs as they take ownership of a product

The first week

During the first week of CodeCollab we are given a client request. Our goal is to design, plan, and implement an app to meet those needs.

To paraphrase Carla, a fellow dev, we begin by building a structure for the rest of the project.

Building a structure with a team is still so new to me. I have experience working on team projects given priorities based on business KPIs or following the structure set by senior developers. But in this first week, the senior devs have challenged us to set these priorities as a team.

So far, this has involved:

  • Identifying our minimum viable product (MVP)
  • Identifying issues to build this MVP: This involved recognizing the smallest pieces or lowest hanging fruit, like building a database first
  • Getting consensus on priorities: Practicing giving convincing rationale for architectural choices, Listening and discerning impact for each option, Handling conflicts and talking it out, Contributing to a generative space for the team to think out loud, make mistakes, and bring each other back to the goal if we need to
  • Identifying and managing scope creep. It’s OK to recognize what we cannot build within a certain amount of time. Advocating for scope boundaries can help us further define our product. Managing our scope will help us focus and deliver quality software in the time we promised.

I’m excited to see where we go from here.

Follow along with DEV posts from my cohort: https://dev.to/ourtimefortech
Check out Our Time For Tech: https://ourtimefortech.org/

Sentry blog image

How I fixed 20 seconds of lag for every user in just 20 minutes.

Our AI agent was running 10-20 seconds slower than it should, impacting both our own developers and our early adopters. See how I used Sentry Profiling to fix it in record time.

Read more

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
aritdeveloper profile image
Arit Developer

AMAZING!!! We're so thrilled to have you along for the journey, Cam! ❤️

Collapse
 
dordsichord profile image
Cam Bui

Thank you Arit! I'm delighted to be here with you all!

Billboard image

The Next Generation Developer Platform

Coherence is the first Platform-as-a-Service you can control. Unlike "black-box" platforms that are opinionated about the infra you can deploy, Coherence is powered by CNC, the open-source IaC framework, which offers limitless customization.

Learn more

👋 Kindness is contagious

Discover a treasure trove of wisdom within this insightful piece, highly respected in the nurturing DEV Community enviroment. Developers, whether novice or expert, are encouraged to participate and add to our shared knowledge basin.

A simple "thank you" can illuminate someone's day. Express your appreciation in the comments section!

On DEV, sharing ideas smoothens our journey and strengthens our community ties. Learn something useful? Offering a quick thanks to the author is deeply appreciated.

Okay