I am one of the lecturers/mentors of the first IronHack edition, a training program for people who want to become professional developers. My part takes only three days and it’s been this week. Three full-day hands-on sessions on JavaScript, TDD and testing techniques. The experience has been fantastic for me.

ironHack

During the class at IronHack

When I knew about this idea of training people with any background so that they become developers in only 8 weeks, I thought… shit man, how the hell are people going to learn and assimilate all the contents and concepts in such a short period of time? That’s impossible! But I was invited as a mentor by Mauricio Morales and his energizing message made think that I wanted to know how this accelerated training academies works. So I accepted the invite to experience something new, to experiment and learn. And it’s been totally worth joining the teachers team 🙂

The best thing it’s been getting to know the people. IronHack staff are great guys and the participants/students are brilliant. They are doing their best to understand all these new techniques and tools despite of their different backgrounds. People that progress faster take their time to pair up with the people that are struggling, helping them speed up the pace and learn. The people with less programming background are very patient and motivated. Well, all of them are very motivated, this is what is exciting in there.

For me it’s been a challenge because I am used to train developers but not beginners. Some of the folks were developers but some of them were pretty new to software development.  And difficulties is what make me learn the most, so I’ve learnt important lessons that will help me out in the near future. Anyway I am quite satisfied with my work and specially with their effort.

Now, as you may imagine, this training does not entitle all the students to consider themselves senior software developers right after the end of it, it’s just too short! But I don’t think that is the objective. They are learning from passionate professionals that work every day in “the real world”. One or two different guys like me every week. They are getting to know the best techniques we know, how we think and work so that they are learning from our mistakes. What has taken years for some of us is summarized in hours during the training. Internalizing them is going to take sometime to students but it’s still faster than some traditional training methods.

I believe this concept is good even if it only serves to add some pressure on other training methods. We need better developers and providing different training alternatives sounds right to me.

If in the future I meet a single person from this fantastic group and she tells me that what we practiced in the class was  useful in her career, then my objective will be accomplished. If they write code with care from now, I’ll be totally satisfied. Code for other human beings, not for machines which is what some people believe after other training programs.

I want to say  THANK YOU to the guys behind IronHach: Ariel Quinones, Gonzalo Manrique, Israel Guitierrez, Xavi Leal, Mauricio Morales and company.

And of course THANK YOU to the intrepid participants: Sergio Revilla, Daniel Bardaji, Daniel Castillo, Agustin de la Villa, Alejandro Dominguez, Daniel Cusan, Marta Fonda, Fernando Moreno, Ruben Kanna, Imanol Yañez y Jaime Muñoz.

 

 

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Tuenti office with my friends: Miguel Angel Garcia, Joaquin Engelmo, David Santiago, Imanol Yañez and Marta Fonda

And I visited Tuenti for my first time, finally!

Yesterday was a very intense day because right after the full-day session at the IronHack, I went to Tuenti offices (Madrid) to give a talk to software engineers.  Last week my good friend Kini and Jose Lorenzo sent my an email inviting me to do so. I didn’t prepare slides because I didn’t feel like giving another talk with slides I felt more like having a discussion. I just prepared a few ideas based on my experience and my point of view to start up the discussion. It was along the lines of professionalism, XP and specially practices like TDD and BDD. Fortunately people were participating in the discussion with a lot of interest. I am not very good at counting but I guess there were more than 50 people. Tuenti gathers some of the most talented developers in the country, not only Spanish developer but also from other countries.  It’s a very nice place, looks  very cool as a place to work. I’ve been listening how good people are in Tuenti for a long time so I am glad I got to know people in person that I only knew from twitter and really enjoyed sharing experiences with them. I hope to meet this group more times in the future.