A developer personal journal

A bootcamp advisor experience

Long time without a new post well, I was pretty busy these past months, after the release of shellcms_b, I got involved in a project being a advisor in a C# bootcamp. And oh boy it was really a experience you won't imagine how many questions students could have, I believe I just recall my first days as a developer so much energy to use so much to say, new things to try and things that I just wanted to learn.

When I entered first in the class I was traveling to Cordoba here in Colombia, but well having the experience of being far away while listening the classic programming introduction to a language, the history, and so on so forth, then inmediatly a hands on, and a huge amount of questions just arised, students jumped in the editor right away and oh no, I did not have either a stable internet connection or a proper laptop.

So it became clear to me that I will need to be in a better position for next session. But again it was a little hard as it required me to connect in both Zoom and Discord just to assist people, but oh oh, I was in the middle of nowhere and the laptop I brought had not either .NET not a proper Zoom Client, even so I was able to assist people with my cellphone.

Well then it became clear that even when I bring the laptop to experience the goods of shellcms_b I did not have a proper copy of my files, and that was a revelation, that my experiment for shellcms_b will require more preparations from my side before jumping in. Sadly because of that I wasn't able to properly post here regularly, I did not want to redo all the posts. I got sick with some tropical variant of flu. So I didn't feel well enough to work 35C degree there were more than enough to keep me from doing extra job besides work.

For the end of that week I tried to install .net in my Manjaro old laptop, it worked pretty well even there and I was able to properly write and follow up code for the bootcamp session with helix editor instead of vscode.

Then I saw an opening, that really I could not be as productive as I wanted but at least I will have the oportunity to help with the code debugging thanks to the .net SDK installed.

After returning properly to my home office routine I wanted to set some goals:

• Properly setting another environment for c# development in my personal computer.
• Giving a talk to the students.
• Work in the port of shellCMS_b to Powershell.

For the first time it was pretty easy as I had already VS Community in my computer I just needed the proper repository quick Git clone and everything was set

Second point was pretty daunting I hadn't ever give a talk, I am just a Chemical Engineer with not that wide idea of the world, but Git even if its wide its used everyday so I tried to make a short presentation in spanish based on various videos with basic stuff. Nothing too complex I did not want to overwelm people, I tried to be very concise when trying to use a branch strategy and on how to push branches to remotes. The fun fact with that talk was that I really wanted to show them things that I considered very basic, and then most of them had not even installed git before the session. That was both frustrating but also a reiminder that the level of the talk should be less bold. I had to change on the fly most of the topics getting in pretty nasty errors because I had not prepared well enough for that basic talk

After the talk, I felt that I needet to give the students a proper explanation and how to get out of that common issues that as developers we face a lot of times, handling unexpected situations, and properly addressing them even after the fact. So I created a youtube video in the old computer (yes an old intel i3 second gen), so I tried OBS for the first time and realized that nowadays technology for recording is amazing (In my times using virtualDub was the way and everything was very complicated to do). I just followed my own notes and recorded for an hour and a half, sent it to the students and they were happy with the session.

I decided in between the bootcamp to attempt to port shellcms_b to Powershell, I had done some progress and I hope I will continue with it also, wanted to style shellcms_b also for BlazeUI CSS framework and at least other two, just to be able to figure out important parts of the code for the style and eventually create a commandline with golang (yes golang) to pack everything.

Then I swtiched jobs (yes pretty funny stuff in my life in these past months) and of course as always as you are leaving a job place they will ask you to try to solve all problems at once just because. So I had even less time to stay behind classes for the bootcamp and getting out of my job, just to have to do the same but in the new job, pretty fun weeks.

I then gave my final talk to the bootcamp students on benchmarking, they did not seem that enthusiastic for that topic (probably because they were finishing at the end of that week) but even so, there was a fantastic way to feel less pressure and to go through all the points I wanted to show.

Finally at the graduation day I was there they were very happy. I could conclude that really most of them just went to the class to see a teacher doing everything and not all of them were very interested in really learning. That felt a little sad, because I am sure me and the other advisors were pretty energic on that idea, but well at the end I think if someone got pretty interested in the topic and tried to explore more about .net and C# we can pat our shoulders, that should be enough.

For now I finally could return to regularly posting here and trying to make my life easier with shellcms_b and have fun. As a side note, when I had been in very far places, where mobile phone internet signal is not that strong and we have only 3G network, I tried to load up this blog and the response time was amazing so I will not cease posting, I have discovered that the purpose for this continues to shine even in 2023.

Tags: general