As I wrote my first blog post on how I got to where I am today, a student at the Turing School of Software and Design, I began realizing that the how isn’t as important as the why.
I came to Turing to learn beyond just the basics of web development, and a few of my goals are:
- Get feedback
- Learn to develop on a team
- Give back to the community
If you want to know the plethora of reasons why I chose Turing in particular, feel free to shoot me an email.
Feedback
What little time I spent programming before Turing was in isolation. I didn’t have any sort of feedback loop other than seeing one way of doing things through a tutorial. I most look forward to learning other ways of solving the same technical challenge, as we all know there is no single way of doing things in programming.
I really value gaining a depth of knowledge that can only come through diversity of opinion and I believe Turing will afford me the opportunity to hear and see those differences in action. They already have a structured mentorship program as well as code reviews with instructors after projects, but I am also looking forward to the more impromptu feedback from other students who are in the same technical “boat” as myself.
Teamwork
I am very excited to work with my fellow students at Turing. We have a very diverse group from all different backgrounds, but with one goal of becoming Ruby on Rails developers. During my time at Turing I hope to learn how to effectively work within a team. As most of our projects with be with either a pair or groups of up to four or five, I am sure I will have many opportunities to work on this skill.
I have been programming in my spare time for a few months now, but only with tutorials or on my own solo projects. I can only imagine what the dynamics are when you add multiple other programmers to the same project. I have spent a little time with git and Github, and I am excited to see how these tools can be managed to create a seamless workflow, or as close to seamless as possible.
The industry seems to be moving more and more towards pair programming and I couldn’t be happier. For me, as a soon to be junior developer, that means I get to work along side seasoned veterans and soak up all their knowledge. More seriously, through the first few weeks of Turing, I have found that the quality of my code is exponentially better when working with a pair. I hope to continue to work on the communication and other soft skills that make pair programming such a worthwhile practice.
Giving Back
I have been incredibly fortunate to be welcomed into the tech community here in Denver both through my time before Turing going to meetups, and now that I am a full time student of web development. I have also saved many hours of my life by finding incredible open source projects that filled a need in a project, and not to mention the fact that Rails is open source.
I would love the opportunity to give back to this local community and the tech community at large. Whether it is speaking at meetups or making open source contributions, I hope to learn all my options for giving back and how to go about them while at Turing.
Moving Forward
As I move through the seven month program, I hope to revisit these learning goals and provide updates on my progress. In the meantime, stay tuned!