Makers Reflection

Hi there,

I have just completed Demo Day for Makers Academy July 2020 Cohort. Here with my team I presented the product we worked on for two weeks. Maelstrom, a sci-fi fantasy RPG game. My team decided to use a totally new framework (React) for this final project. This was super fun as it gave us a challenge to learn and deploy something in a little under two weeks.

The final result was a awesome little game that has a good base, we can see how with more time we could develop and add so many more features to it which is perfect. We wanted something that we could work off and adapt easily and we managed to reach it in the final week (despite having to learn alot about animation).

Other than that the weeks prior starting for weeks 8-9 were another project. Acebook a facebook clone made using Ruby on Rails. This was truly mind boggling at first seeing how powerful Rails is compared to Sinatra. One command does about 2hrs work… however I am so glad I was first exposed to the way of coding in Sinatra before diving into Rails (something I want to work with in the future), as it gave a good base level of understanding.

Moving on from that the week 10 prior to final projects was a chance to brush up on developer process and code quality. Tech tests were at the forefront and you had to complete and send off your code to a coach who would provide detailed feedback on the code and how to improve different areas.

On reflection I have learnt an incredible amount over the last few months and my the idea of TDD is now so familiar to me that I actually prefer using this process (at the start I hated it and thought that it was slow). As well as exposing myself to some languages which make it so i’m not afraid to go away and try a web app using python or anything else.

Thanks for reading, Dillon