5 Perfect Ingredients - Happy Bootcamp Story 56 of 100

This hour felt productive.

TL;DR: Burning an hour to advance a career is always a gamble. Here's what can make it worthwhile, with LiveCoding in a real meeting, as an example.

Interview Reports

Ricardo Edwards reported the circumstances around yesterday's job interview.

This is everything, to this group. Why are we here? To get interviewed, to do well.

Al Fu Prepped

Before the meeting ever started...

We started with continuity from the last session, with Al Fu spending a few minutes between sessions. He had experimented with what we were working on the previous day.

Al Fu is already super busy - he didn't have to be here today, he didn't have to volunteer time between sessions, he didn't have to volunteer to share.

We could have done this without him, but it would not have been as snappy, or productive.

All Pro

Attendance and participation this day is limited to an all-pro lineup.

If you looked at their schedules, you might gauge these 5 as the least likely to carve out an hour to invest in learning from each other in a LiveCoding session on an early Friday morning.

Once the meeting starts, you quickly realize why. Each person is participating fully, blurting out thoughts and observations as the process evolves. No shrinking violets, here. When you are fully invested, you make the time.

Comparing Options

We looked at multiple options for solving our first technical challenge.

Al took us through both, and spending the extra time comparing the benefits of each gave us:

1. We got to make an educated choice.

2. The run through gave everyone a better understanding of what the code itself was doing, under the covers.

Strong Finish - All the Things

When you go down a rabbit hole, it's nice to finish with a return to the relaxed patterns of a strong finish, working processes, and a functional UI.

We had been through code.

We had been through the defining docs and visuals for the ticket.

And now we are finishing up with the usual process for UI testing, checking in, pushing, and the paperwork/admin that ties a button on our session. All participants are relaxed and feeling confident. The improvement was working exactly as planned.

It was a good hour, we used our time well.