This is my first post I will make an effort to start blogging more about my journey into tech the ups and downs and the things that I learn along the way to becoming a software engineer. Yesterday, I took part in my first hackathon it was a really interesting and great learning experience for me.
It was with Mintbean.io which hosts career hackathons for a way to help developers build up experience which helps in the job hunt. In this hackathon, we had to build a markdown editor in JavaScript and there was a time limit of two hours. It reminded me of those crazy good ole days when I had to do code challenges during my time at Flatiron School but I'll leave that for another post. Although I did complete the challenge and made the markdown editor it was pretty basic and didn't have much cool styling :(
I did learn a lot and that's always a good thing and after the challenge, we had the opportunity to partake in a code review which was awesome because I seldom get the opportunity to do that. It's a very important skill to develop because they say software engineers spend about a third of their time reviewing code. It was 30 minutes where we reviewed each other's code in separate teams. I really got a good opportunity to learn from reviewing other people's code and it gave me good insights into what it means to write good code that's modular and dry.
There was also a hireside chat with a senior developer which was awesome because she gave us a wealth of knowledge about her experiences and had the opportunity to ask questions about how to best navigate the tech interview process and some tips on how to stand out from the competition some information which I knew and some of which I didn't.
Then after that, the senior developers will then eventually review everyone's code based on the code quality and completion of the code challenge, the aesthetic quality, and a third on the good constructive feedback you give on the code review. Overall it was a great learning experience and regardless of the outcome, I'm grateful for having the experience to learn from other developers and from the challenge itself and I can't wait for the next one.
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