Episode — 2
PK from KEC in episode-2 came up with several interesting questions this week and the participation level of folks was quite motivating. As we are making decent progress towards the structure of the show, the response and enthusiasm from the audience are taking a rise gradually.
Here are the highlights of the second episode, sharing them below.
I am a second-year B.Tech student of the CS branch, I am not much skilled right now but want to learn more about coding, should I apply for an internship? What are my chances of getting selected for an internship?
Relating it with my story, I wasn’t much skilled and aware of the pathway to follow in my second year of college. I knew a bit of programming but didn’t know how it would help me to solve real-world challenges. I didn’t even know about internships and their values during those days. Lately (in my seventh semester), I came to know about ColoredCow through a CodeTrek session in our college. I immediately applied and got selected for the internship program. What I believe is that skills don’t matter much if you want to pursue a career in a domain, it’s just about finding the right mentorship. At that time (during CodeTrek), I was pretty much fascinated with ColoredCow and the way of working, I thought to give a shot by working with them and everything started changing for me since then. Now, I can see the transformation on a very different level. I would say don’t worry about chances of getting selected, just find what suits you the best. In case, if you don’t get selected, at least you will get to know what worked and what didn’t. It’s a whole feedback loop once you get into things.
Which books would you refer to a student who wants to pursue their carrier in software development?
I believe that there are several books to read on different stages of life to get appropriate learning at the appropriate time. I don’t know how to answer this, but in my initial days of internship, my mentors suggested me to read several books.
During the internship itself, we did a very beautiful and productive exercise. It was around categorizing the books for college folks, like which book should be read in which year of engineering. Here is the link for the details.
Even today, I read books for learning new theories and sciences. Below, I am sharing the ones which I read in the initial days of my journey. These books helped me to learn a lot during those days:
- The Pragmatic Programmer
- The Code Complete
- Eat that Frog
- Don’t Make Me Think
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Any message you would like to give to students working on preparatory exercises at ColoredCow?
Back in my internship days, I had gone through several layers of preparatory exercises, starting from the very first vanilla PHP one. I remember, being a final year student, we were assigned to build an application on Laravel and WordPress integration, which was supposed to be rocket science for me. My mentors suggested starting with the very basic exercise, I accepted my constraints and incapabilities and gave that a shot. I wasn’t much-skilled in HTML/CSS and PHP, hence I started from the basic one. Having some skills, my colleagues used to make decent progress as compared to me, but I didn’t use to compare myself to them. I had full faith in mentorship and always used to work on their feedback on priority. I used to set small targets for a day in the initial days, rather than jumping into something big. Breaking a problem into various steps and then accomplishing it bite by bite, I used to achieve little success daily. Progress rate was although very slow, but I always tried to make sure not to lose basic concepts behind. I believe it was the feedback loop that helped me get better day by day. I accepted what I was, and started from there itself, which worked pretty well for me.
How to learn a new programming language?
Earlier in the college days, learning a new programming language was to solve the basic coding questions starting from the beginner level and gradually making progress. But whatever I have experienced from that, I don’t even remember C++ and python pretty well, because I didn’t build something with them while I was learning. That’s where I want to connect it with my internship period, where I started with basic PHP, but the approach was different. I was given a basic application to build in PHP language. Before getting into the coding and learning PHP syntax, I understood the problem first, created a solution architecture and database schema. To be more specific, we pulled it through the SDLC steps. Learning PHP syntax was not tricky, but building applications was. That’s where I found the suitable tutorials on Laracast shared with us in the problem introduction session. I went through that, and the way of explaining things in those tutorials was like start building a small functionality, adding components, and gradually making it a big application by applying advanced concepts of the language. That’s where I found the contrast between the ways of learning (in college and in the internship). If you are trying to learn a programming language, just don’t master the concepts by reading them, try building something right from day one. As you go through a new concept, integrate it into your application and repeat the cycle. That worked for me quite a lot.
Conclusion:
The questions had a very different domain in the session. So far, I could relate the questions to my journey. Excited to hear out more from you guys, having some industry experts alongside me.
Hope you guys enjoyed talking on PK from KEC. We will be meeting next week on Thursday again at the same time 4:30 pm. For the fresh participants, here is the link to join the show.
