7digital Technical Academy: My First Fortnight

The academy

Outline

The reasons the Technical Academy was established exactly reflect the situation many Computer Scientists graduates will face, like myself, as described by 7digital’s Head of Development, in a recent article:

Universities need to be more integrated with tech businesses. Most courses give people a deep understanding of the science but when it comes to developing software they're not so effective... We've started our own technical Academy to teach people what they don't learn at university.

My impression

I found out about the academy through a chance referral and I was really enthused by the description and the idea of working at 7digital. This was reinforced by my experience at the interview and the manner in which subsequent events were handled:

• a positive, almost apologetic, email stating that 7digital couldn't accommodate me, although they would get in touch in the event this changed;
• then being made an offer months later (due to an opening).

First experimentation with C#

Before university, I had no experience in computer science. We were introduced to Java from pretty much day one and, having never programmed before, it took me a while to play catch-up. By the end of my final year, I was very comfortable using Java, having survived my jump in the deep end and even opting to use it for my final year project!

I constantly hear how being a developer is about readily learning and implementing new languages and tools. Now I am entering the real world (my job starts in less than a week) and I have to relinquish beloved Java for C#! It could be worse, transitioning from Java to C# is fairly trivial.

Next, I needed something to learn.

Google: programming problems.

Here's the result!

Start the ball rolling

For a while, I've been trying to gather inspiration and momentum for my own blog. Part of the problem has been a lack of a particular area to talk about, how ever niche it may be. More generally, I haven't found the mindset to know if something is actually interesting to read/write about. Instead, I investigated blog-hosting websites and, as if I had nostalgia for Myspace, checked which would break first:

• the template code; or
• the foolish person attempting to modify it.

Tumblr looked promising, but it didn't take long to feel counter-intuitive and annoying. Blogger has already impressed me more, so I'm probably here to stay!

Most recently, the idea of blogging was rekindled by Coding Horror, whilst discovering new interests and ways to self-learn, with the added intention of impressing interviewers. For similar reasons, I decided to construct an online portfolio.

Currently, I'm thinking I'll use this blog for anything and everything, be it general ramblings about life, work-related or something I've developed in my own time. I intend to maintain another blog in parallel, containing the super-nerdy bits (code, etc), which I may refer to in more general posts on here.