Saving Earth from a possible alien colonialization!!!
Sorry if I mislead you into believing that I am going to present a patent for the next iron man suit(wish I had it) or Captain America’s might shield(my Amazon Wishlist is never empty) . Lastly sorry about my naiveness about the Marvel Universe. But I am sure, very much like me, you must have thought about a possible alien invasion and the Marvel superheroes(or DC) have their tasks cut out.
Since your regular 9–5 does not let you day dream and you are somehow always stuck in meeting the deadlines or awaiting client approvals that even an attempt to dislocate the entire cause of your existence and survival is at stake, I feel obligated to prepare you for such an event.
I might have exaggerated a bit(okay a whole lot), but Crio’s focus on learning by doing is a perfect epitome of how reading about surviving in a possible space invasion is totally different from actually doing it.
Crio.do recently came up with the program, the Winter of Doing, and it focusses mainly on micro-experiences and learning beyond the conventional rotting system. Structured in the form of bytes, where each byte focused on one major concept, the attempt in each stage was to make users learn by experimenting and ‘think’ the very need of why is this line of code so important for the whole program. Being a lucky participant, I want to summarize my learning in two major categories.
There is no denying that the Internet contains resources to learn. But more often than not, it creates a problem of too many. I learnt how important it is to filter out the information about the HOWs of the technology. Following the HOWs, I could answer the WHY,WHAT ELSE and WHAT IF. It doesn't matter if you are an expert with 10 years of experience or a fresher who picked python as his first programming language because the name itself is so cool. You always learn by experimenting and I ended up doing the same.
The first stage of the program involved skills in web development. Do you know what actually happens when you type https://www.google.com on your browser? How would the ‘s’ in ‘https’ make a difference in how things happen in the backend? It might sound like a cliché amongst a few media houses right now, but the program made me believe in the moto of Question Everything.
When to use PATCH, where to use PUT, how does GET work, being a few examples. Following this byte was the byte for Linux, which is more or less a bible for every aspiring computer science nerd. Once again, I experimented with a few options for all the major commands used in shell scripting and for the first time actually understood, the idea behind how files are stored in Linux. I also got a little exposure to the Cloud(AWS) side of things as one of the bytes involved deploying a pre-built android app on AWS server. Everyone understands the need of Cloud now but not everyone learns it. I took my first steps by starting with a simple S3 storage to experiment to learn more in near future. Finally, realizing the need of Open Source and Version Control, Git byte was also a part of the curriculum.
The other set of learnings are more on a personal level for me. I learnt that its probably okay to crib about how you are being undervalued but it is not okay to not do anything to turn it around. The daily challenge to focus after long working hours required old school vocabulary words like efforts, patience, determination, etc. I was able to carry on because this section of Curious Cats in every byte always had an element to tickle the brain. Above all, I believe the question is only how far can you push yourself?
Lastly, the entire community, co-participants, organizers, mentors deserve the loudest shout outs for making it the best learning experience. Good Luck to Team Crio for organizing more such events in future and inspiring nerds one step at a time(To create memes at least).
