Second time writing this, if you’re reading this, welcome to the series where I document all I’ll be learning in the ALX program. It’s a year-long journey and I hope you ride with me to the end.
What is the ALX platform about?
ALX is a technology training provider interested in providing 2 million job opportunities to young talents in Africa by 2030. One of the modalities slated to realize this goal is the ALX Software Engineering program. Participants of this program are trained on how to become software Engineers within a year. It's no news how cumbersome it is, as participants are required to invest at least 70 to 80 hours per week to complete this program. I find this claim relative as the number of hours you put in is relative to how much you know. Beginners have to put in more work and invest more time to catch up, however, if you’ve got some experience you shouldn’t face a lot of challenges.
Activities for the Day:
It’s the first day of the program and I’m in the cohort 19 group. Projects assigned to be done today involved watching videos where Fred Swanicker the CEO of African Leadership Network, the mother body of ALX, spoke to us about the main aim of the program which is to teach us how to 'Do hard things'.
It’s a year-long program that would involve several days of learning and the right way to learn remains a paramount skill to have. To enable us to learn right, the Feynman technique was the go-to skill we were asked to employ in this program and it involves 4 basic principles, namely;
Write down any concept you wish to learn and study it adequately.
Try to explain it in the most basic term possible. Some would say try to explain it to a child but the main idea remains that one should be able to simplify whatever concept they’ve studied in simple terms.
Recognize gaps in your knowledge and refer back to the original resource to gather more knowledge.
Reorganize your thoughts.
In summary, the Feynman technique by Richard Feynman employs the tool of teaching as a means of learning.
Slack Onboarding:
The official platform for communicating within this program is Slack and most participants are onboarded there. It’s similar to Discord but requires one to get their hands dirty to get a grasp of it.
The Intranet:
Is the learning management system for the program and most participants were onboarded today. It hosts a tonne of features that enable the smooth completion of projects. Some of these features include:
1. The checker: an amazing tool that can be used to assess your projects and also score yourself to see if you’ve been able to complete your projects.
2. The sandbox: it’s a safe virtual environment that utilizes the Ubuntu OS. Proud to announce that it is in the Linux environment so it gives one full access to the Linux features through a web terminal.
All I've written above is a summary of what I achieved today, while I perform the simpler tasks, I anticipate the difficult tasks. The only way you can know when the difficult tasks have been issued is if you join my newsletter, so do well to join.