Work in the Web

I have recently taken part in Work in the Web which is a 3-day workshop for students who want to work in the web industry. For myself, this is a great chance to learn more about the industry I want to work in and gain more knowledge and experience. Moreover, it helped massively with my final year project providing tools, knowledge, and advice from professionals.

Day 1

A key session from day 1 of Work in the Web was on the basic principles of web design showing the importance of designing for a wide audience and how valuable our choices are in making the design. A good point I found was to avoid excessive use of ALL CAPS as it is hard for people with dyslexia to read. Finally, we ended the day with sessions on Command-Line and Github, these tools are so useful to your skillset as you can gain greater control over systems functions with the command-line and you can use it for version control with Git. Github is very useful to track changes in your code and see your history of the project, this is why I have created a repo in order to back up my project and code and so it is easily accessible and so I can share it with future employers. Furthermore, it means if I encounter any problems in my project I can revert back to the code before it was broken. 

Work in the Web 

Day 2

I developed my coding skills in the ‘Untangling JavaScript’ workshop which covered variables, arrays, objectives, and loops. This is relevant to my project as I have to pass my PHP code through an Ajax function to make my application work in Cordova. Mixd also gave us a tutorial on how to create a droplet in Digital Ocean in order to host our applications. This is something to refer back to when it comes to distributing the application and getting it live. 

Student listening to talk

Day 3

We were fortunate to have talks from a number of guest speakers, the first of the day was a talk on APIs from Mike Francis who works at Bulb Energy. This was very informative and useful for my application as I will be using an API from meetup.com to get data on coding events in the area. One of my favourite parts of Work in the Web was the talk ‘From milliseconds to millions’ by Harry Roberts who gave us some amazing advice and tips on web performance. This is something I am going to utilise for my project to make sure I give the user the best performance for this I am going to use Google Lighthouse to perform audits to make sure the performance of the app is the best it can be. Also, Harry showed us the ways of Google Analytics and how to make the most use out of it. 

Wall of Comments

What I Learnt 

Over the course of Work in the Web I have learnt so much, I have developed my coding skills, my knowledge of APIs and servers, and made many valuable connections. The guest speakers spoke about an array of things from the technical aspects of APIs, web performance and servers. 

Top 5 things I am taking away for my project 

·       API Knowledge - how to use APIs to get and receive data

·       Web performance - use Google Lighthouse and Google Analytics to see and analyse the performance

·       Design - think about the accessibility of my designs and the meaning conveyed 

·       Github - back up code and keep track of progress and history

·       JavaScript - more coding knowledge on JavaScript and how to use Ajax with PHP

Class of 2020

Summary 

Overall, this event was so useful not only to my personal development in the industry but to my final year project. I work at Mixd part-time alongside my studies and I made the most out of the opportunity by asking questions to help with my final year project.