Finally My GTF Bootcamp Ended!
Yay! Today marks the end of my GoToFinancial Bootcamp session with the coaches and peers. It is an overall hard experience but it is really satisfying one once you’ve went through it. As Dr Seuss have said:
Dont cry because it’s over, Smile because it’s happened
Thankfully, while doing those hard tasks, the coaches and friends are really helpful to us in a lot of way. The thing I love the most about the style of teaching here is most of the learning is moderated by the student themselves. The coaches didn’t just tell us the material, but we need to figure it out ourselves.
Another thing that I would like to note is about the culture, in my previous post, I talked about four cultures that I have learnt in the DevOps bootcamp. Here, I want to talk about the Core Engineering bootcamp that happens before the Devops bootcamp. The Core Engineering Bootcamp tells us about the best practices that people use in GTF to write clean codes. The key takeaways from the Core Engineering bootcamp are:
- Commit Should Be as Small as Possible
Before the bootcamp, I usually commit at the end of the day, or when I finished a task. But in here, we are encouraged to make commit as small as possible so that when there is something wrong that happens in our code, we can revert it back to the previous working version that works. This saves up a lot of time and it also makes it easier to track changes when reviewing a pull request. So now, I usually does a lot of commits in every task and it made me feel much safer. - Avoid Code Smells, Learn About It
Simply put, Code smell is a piece of code that sucks! This means that a code smell is a piece of code that doesn’t really express its intent well, and could be refactored to a better version of itself. Code smell might go unnoticed until it became a huge problem. So identifying and knowing how to avoid those code smells might be a benefit later on. You can read more about types of code smells here. (There are a lot of them, I haven’t finished it yet lol) - Everything is Arguable
In the Core Engineering Bootcamp, and later in the Devops Bootcamp, we were taught to argue about things that we find weird, or not effective, or we might not need yet, anything! We are forced to come out of our own shell, especially for Indonesian, as I believe our culture is about not offending other and staying humble, which is good, but when applied to professional environment might cause problem when a certain problem goes unnoticed because a member is too shy to tell it to the team. - Behavior Driven Development
This is the main thing that the bootcampers learnt in core engineering bootcamp. We were taught how to develop from the smallest behavior that our client can observe, to the biggest challenges that they provide. As my coach, Mas Iqbal, once said “ BDD might not seem necessary to implement at known domain, but It’ll be really useful when coding an unknown one.” This means that when solving a problem that we know how to solve already, testing the behavior one by one might not seem necessary. But if the problem is on an unknown domain, improving the code little by little based on the behavior will help us on writing the code. Also, we were taught to do 1 spec (a test), 1 commit and red-green-commit which means that in each commit, we write a test that doesn’t pass (red), we modify our code to pass it (green), then we commit it (commit).
Also in this bootcamp there’s also a lot of fun things aside from learning how to code. I have improved my writing and speaking skill thanks to the bootcamp. I have also made amazing friends and be able to learn from skilled mentors and I’m really grateful for that. All and all, this bootcamp was an overall amazing experience, it’s a really hard one but it taught me a lot of skills that I would never have imagined that I learned it in only 1.5 months.
Special thanks to:
- All of the coaches & speakers
- All of the bootcampers
- Kak Tiara & Mutia for facilitating our bootcamp
- The teams that involved on delivering our meals on offline bootcamp :D
