Five weeks ago I started the Couch to 5K running challenge and since then I have felt better about my coding skills. How do they correlate? Frequent exercise has been proven to benefit both physical and mental health. I’ve noticed a difference in my approach to problem-solving and debugging. I feel like I’m kinder to myself when I don’t understand and more inclined to ask my tutors and cohort members for help.

The point of the Command Shift bootcamp is to upskill people that are interested in tech but for whatever reason haven’t made the jump into it. For some, like me, it’s a case of career switching. It was only when I sent my junior developer CV for review it dawned on me. I’m in the best position to move into tech than I’ve ever been before. The realisation that my career switch is on the horizon feels amazing. I’m not under any illusions that it’s going to be a cakewalk. I know the recruitment market is full of devs trying to get work in challenging times but I’ve made it this far, and I’m not giving up now. I’m my own cheerleader when I’m running and my own cheerleader when I’m coding.

Why? It’s not because of some misplaced ego but because it’s really tough! Whereas telling myself how much I suck at this is far too easy. If I ever feel like giving up during a run, to steal a phrase from Taylor Swift, I just shake it off. It’s the same mindset for my coding career. I’m not tired, I can do this. I submitted my first application the day I released my last blog post. I got rejected mind you but I get it, it’s nothing personal. I took this as a positive, akin to running a test to see if my code works. My application made its way to a recruiting desk and returned a rejection. Besides, this would be a really boring story if I got my first job at the first time of asking. Some say it can take one hundred applications before you get an opportunity. In that case, the journey has only just begun.

Indulge me in a tangent if you will, from time to time I’ll watch a bit of wrestling and many years ago, a wrestling developmental show aired on the WWE Network called NXT. It was the place where independent wrestlers and sports people turned wrestlers would practice their character skills in the ring, and on the microphone before eventually getting called up to the main roster and to TV. Well, there was one wrestler who watched as his wrestling cohort on the independent circuit all got signed up. He didn’t. He kept fighting and fighting until one day, it did happen, and he did get signed up. He got his foot in the door, he won the NXT Championship, he excelled on the grandest stage of them all and he’s never looked back. I’m not saying I’m the Kevin Owens of tech but I can relate to that feeling of watching your friends earn their own success while you have to have to chip away a bit more to get a foot in the door.

With that said, a few weeks ago it was time to present our final group projects to our cohort and then we would be grouped together to work on a select few. It wasn’t enough for me to turn up and improvise what I was going to share with the group, no matter the scope of my initial idea. I have to give credit to Chris Edwards because I see the effort he makes to do more and that makes me ask the question, have I put enough effort in? So, what did I do? I turned to my strengths and I turned to the marketing job I’ve been doing for the last (nearly) four years. I put together slides for my idea that included wireframes of the app with annotations about why I included something and what the purpose of the function would be. I was the only member of our twenty-strong cohort to do this, I went first with my presentation it was very well received by the group. I can do this, I’m not tired!

The idea came from a problem I have that needs to be solved. I support my local football team Cambridge United but I also collect football shirts from other clubs. I didn’t want to keep going through my collection one item at a time to review my inventory. A few days before the project idea submission I didn’t know what this football shirt app looked like. Then I had that lightbulb moment in the shower. What if I had a place to look at my shirts all in one place? At that moment, KitStack was born. Take a look at the repo on GitHub.

Had this idea not been voted for, it would have been something that I worked on in my own time but as I mentioned in the title, it did get picked. I am delighted to be building this app with Mike Brewer and Joseph Redmond. Working together as a team is a natural fit for us and we know what we need to do to get this project over the finish line. I converted my initial Canva presentation into a brand toolkit using Figma to wireframe our app pages and components. We’re using Trello to delegate tasks and we have a dedicated WhatsApp group and Slack channel to communicate progress and blockers to each other. The first thing we had to do was identify what our minimum viable product is. My initial idea was inspired by Pinterest in terms of social media, it included a marketplace like eBay for shirt sales between users and was going to use a price comparison function for people looking to buy new shirts. Reading that back, I can see the amount of work we would have had to complete in a few weeks. Thankfully, we agreed on a project that was deliverable and manageable. The MVP of our project is to allow users to sign up for our app via their email or Google, and then create a list of their shirts that would then be displayed in their profiles. One of our tutors said, “Build a few things exceptionally well and add more functionality and styling later.” This lives at the front of my mind now.

Our planning has been productive, we’ve chosen the tech stack we want to work with and the nuances like fonts and colour palettes for the aesthetic of our design. Collectively, we spent three hours together to make sure we could competently manage pull requests on GitHub because we didn’t want this to be a learning gap later down the line. We also voted to review each other's code at the time of the pull request. The soft skills we’ve honed in our day jobs are fitting in well on this build and the tech skills we’ve learned since October are converging on this project. It’s about communication, collaboration, delegation and pooling our skillsets to deliver a product that solves a problem.

On that note, I’m going to leave it there. The next blog post will be my last in the series because my bootcamp journey is coming to its conclusion. I’ll be sharing how the app turned out and what I’ll be doing next.