Last year, November 23rd I joined Microverse, a remote school for software developers as a full-time student. To join Microverse one has to be fully committed to learning for eight hours daily adding up to forty hours weekly meaning no part-time jobs or full-time jobs then work part-time. One is expected to attend all daily routines and submit weekly projects by the end of the week. Personally, I decided to commit myself and be a full-time student.
I finally managed to complete all major curriculums(Technical/Professional/Coding Challenges) and am currently on a full-time Job-search which might end soon and thought I should share how the past year has been at Microverse.
From the beginning the experience at Microverse has been amazing, one the first eight weeks you're paired to a mentor who helps guide you through the program:- how to fill forms, attend stand-up team meetings, learn and work on projects in an efficient way so that you meet datelines and ask any questions or concern that is blocking you. After the first weeks, you're eligible to apply to be a mentor to new students joining the program. For me, I had a mentor who helped me well and I always looked up to him, we normally had weekly standup once per week where I should what I have worked on, whether I did everything as expected and if I was behind he would correct me or give a piece of advice. When the first weeks elapsed I was assigned a mentee whom we also had frequent conversations and checkups.
The Microverse program is project-based learning so you read through some resources for a given language then it's followed by a project description for a project related to what you were covering. Projects have timelines to be followed once done building the project you submit for code review. The code reviewer check through the project if it meets requirements: good readME, GitHub actions & Linters, project description(should be working properly). If the project doesn't meet this you're sent some changes to make once done you submit it for re-review, once it meets all requirements the project is approved and you move to the next project or part of the curriculum.
The program involved collaborative learning where you're grouped into standup teams, for each standup team you're around 4-6 and you get to meet daily for the first thirty minutes of the day and last fifteen minutes. The first session is for pair-programming or peer-to-peer code review among team members, since each team involves people in the same level of the curriculum all can relate to the projects being done at that stage, for other days you can work on coding challenges. For the first few months, the standup teams are changed frequently to enable students to meet new team members from different regions of the world. The standup team that lasted longer allowed me to meet friends from Uzbekistan, Nigeria, India, and Kenya(in my team we were two Kenyans).
Still, on collaboration, the projects built on different modules are either:-
- Collaborative:- you're assigned a coding partner to learn and work on a given project together then submit for code review once the project is approved and the next project is collaborative you request for a new coding partner to help you collaborate with at least one people by the end of the program. With pair-programming, you get to understand the person's personality, ways of coding and maybe some new shortcuts and also good practice common in workplace setup so at times you'll disagree but get to learn from it at the end either conflict resolution, dealing with different personalities, disagreements, etc. I ever had coding partners from the U.K, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, India, and Qatar.
- Solo:- for solo projects this was mostly projects done at the end of the module where one was expected to read through project requirements and work on the project alone. Once done, you request for code review and follow the cycle until the project gets approved. Solo projects were mostly timeline to be done within seven days and mostly at the end one has to attach a video telling more about the project, technologies used, and how a user can use the web application or page this was to help with communication and proper documentation of a project.
The program was arranged into modules following the languages to be learned i.e:-
- HTML & CSS module: learn HTML, CSS and Bootstrap, CSS framework & SASS, CSS pre-compiler. Build respective projects i.e collaborative and solo.
- Ruby module: learn Ruby, the programming language for building server-side, and Ruby on Rails, a framework of Ruby and build projects related to the two i.e solo/collaborative
- JavaScript module: learn Vanilla JavaScript, React & Redux and [projects related to each section(solo/collaborative).
- Fullstack project: Ruby on Rails API with React & Redux frontend that uses the RoR API
Apart from the technical curriculum, professional skills and coding challenges were also part of core learning. As a developer looking for jobs having a good LinkedIn profile, Github profile, cover letter, communication skills(emails, spelling errors/Grammarly, written/spoken), time management(using time management & productivity tools like Clockify, project timelines, daily schedules), accountability, among other aspects. Data structures and algorithms also play a core role in software developers journey thinking and problem-solving together with getting through technical assessment in most job interviews. The job search curriculum is also well-crafted with support from a career coach for guidance while getting through interviews and offers.
The overall Microverse team/management are focused on student success and ensuring all ends work well from managing efficiency of the curriculum(shift from 1.0 to 2.0 in order to make it more collaborative and better for career market/developer growth), code review process(to prevent delays & adherence to standard), attending to student concerns and absenteeism request among others. Always had monthly school assemble where all students and staff meet with Q&A sessions, curriculum changes(major school announcements), success stories(best-rated students in terms of curriculum progress & in terms of professional skills shown, best collaborators, best code reviewers, students who recently completed school or alumni who recently got jobs). With this, we all felt like one family and got everything in the open.
With the intensive curriculum, school timelines, and strict code reviews, I find the whole experience was worthwhile and has trained me a lot to be a better software developer. English was the language used and most developer teams prefer this considering the remote setup. Also Slack, Zendesk, and Email were the main communication tools making the stay more efficient and effective on the learning process. Having technical and professional skills has helped prepare me for the job market.
In between the year, I have been able to land a paid open-source internship and do an introduction to blockchain development course by Binance. My main interest in software development has been an end goal of building a career path in blockchain developer and this year has given me an opportunity to start diving into blockchain development through short learning programs, hackathons, and communities that drive the web3 conversation. I'm also part of the ChainLink Developer Experts program, a program that gives me chance to get closer to blockchain conversation, make explore & use some of Chainlink's ecosystem tools(learning, development, testing, deployment & management) and host blockchain-related meetups.
Here is the blockchain development roadmap that I came up with as part of the learning process:-
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