The day-to-day of the software engineering Academy  

I joined Digital Futures to learn something new and progress into a new career path. It allowed a path into software engineering for someone with no previous professional coding knowledge. Since university I have done various jobs, which I have enjoyed, but have never felt any were a long-term career. 

Before Digital Futures I spent some time over lockdown doing some online coding courses, which triggered my interest in this as a career. Having a course that allowed development in various coding languages in a structured manner helped enormously. In just four weeks we have already learnt Java and JavaScript, with a brief look at HTML and CSS styling for front end work. 

Each week there is a challenge, which allows us to practise using the tools that we have learnt each week, and has really helped provide a measure of how my skills have progressed, as it is very easy to compare the projects created at the beginning of the course to what the projects’ contents are four weeks in. 

After lunch time each day we have peer groups, which allow us to review each day and enable us to talk freely about the course, progression and other people’s expectations and reasoning why they wished to join Digital Futures. 

Pair programming helps to develop coding alongside other people, which is a useful tool for once we begin to move from the course into a company. It also has made us experiment with various methods of coding practises, from driver-passenger coding, where one codes and the other makes suggestions, to side-by-side coding, which is very fluid for working with people not in the same room.