Our students work on real projects, they tell us about their experience
Practice makes perfect. Not only that, practice teaches you, something particularly true in web development. That’s why our courses prioritize doing things rather than listening to theory. From the very first week, our students are engaged in projects: they learn as they move forward in creating a site, an application, a game…
Undoubtedly, the most important project is the last one, which is provided by a real company collaborating with Wild Code School. Besides improving their technical skills, the students also learn how it is to work with a client using Scrum methodology: they have to meet with them and understand their needs, establish the right communication channels, work with sprints, prioritize tasks… It all ends on Demo Day, a special event just at the end of the training, when we invite companies to come see prototypes made by our Wilders.
Interview Raquel and Eva, Madrid
Last week, our students from the Madrid Campus met for the first time with the companies Wakyma and ApetEat, who have very exciting projects for them. Do you want to know what the students have to say? We interview Raquel, Mªdel Carmen and Eva to understand more.
Hi Raquel! You’re working with other two classmates in the client-project. Please tell us more about it?
Sure! For this project am working with Dermot and Alena on a prototype for Wakyma. They need an initial prototype for a web application. We need to create a login for users, user’s ratings… We only started and are discussing with Wakyma’s CEO about the best technology to apply in the prototype: React for the Front? MongoDb or GraphQL? We’re evaluating the best solution together.
That sounds great. Tell us how is it to work in a group? How did you split the work?
Our group is awesome. My teammates are more interested in the front-end part, so they will work on that side. Personally, I have a preference for the back-end, so I can focus in that area. This is a very thorough project and it’s giving us the chance to get deeper into both the front and back ends of web development.
Let’s move on now to the other group. Eva, I’ll start with you. Tell us about your project and how was the planning phase.
We’re working with ApetEat to develop a site where employees can reward other co-workers in order to thank each other. You can reward their support, their initiative…
We apply SCRUM methodology and as a tool we’re using Trello. When we got the instructions given by ApetEat, we started creating the backlog and the user stories, which we’ve finished already. We also finished the wireframes. Yesterday, we meet with the CTO of ApetEat, and together with him we’re going to break up the project into very small parts that we can work on weekly. Even though we’re at an early stage, we’re already learning. In my case, I’m getting to understand user stories.
Mª del Carmen, you’re also working with Eva. What are the biggest challenges you face?
I think the main one is how to create the databases and connect it to the front-end. We are only getting started with databases in the course, so we will learn as we apply them in the project as well. We’ve seen lots of concepts in a separate way, so in the prototype we’re gonna get the chance to put them together to create our solution.
The projects sounds like fun… and also like hard work! Fortunately, our Wilders count with the support of their trainers and the mentorship of Wakyma’s CEO and ApetEat CTO’s. We can’t wait to see the end result in 9 weeks!
Interview Anastasiya, Berlin
How did you plan your first bigger project? What did you learn?
One of the big projects I’ve been working on was the last one in Wild Code School – we decided to develop a webapp that allows user to play simple game with questions and answers to choose. We used Trivia API for this game. We had 5 weeks to complete the project so at the beginning we were not particularly worried. We started with requirements analysis, API investigation and planning. We already know what SCRUM is and how to use it, so we wrote user stories and prepared backlog in Trello, set up environment and just started implemented step by step. What did I learn? It’s better to be pessimistic when you estimate time required to complete a task. And, of course, we apply the power of React to solve real problems. That’s awesome!
How was it to work in a group?
Well, to be honest for me it was challenging. When you work alone you don’t need to spend time to read and understand others code and you can create everything as you wish, but I understand, that in real life we will always work in a team and we need to be prepared for this. So, working on project in a team is very helpful and it’s a good experience. And I’m grateful to my team for this time.
How did you share tasks?
Actually we just said who wants to work on what and tried to divide tasks so as not to interfere with each other. And I can say that we coped quite successfully with this.
What were the biggest challenges you faced?
The biggest challenge for me was to turn a blind eye to imperfections. Due to lack of time, priorities had to be set and some issues can be postponed or even marked as won’t be fixed. I worked as a software tester before, you should understand my pain.
Did you use any tools which helped you to stay organized?
Calendar 🙂
What did you really enjoy?
I’m really happy to see how we apply knowledge that we got during the past 2 months. And React is an amazing tool, it allows us to do so many things, makes app feel dynamic. I also enjoyed to observe how our project gradually increased its functionality. And in the end you can feel that you have created something.
