Learnings from a new Dad Chapter #1

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Get these before you baby is born…

It’s only been 9 days since my son Nash was born. It’s been a crazy ride so far. Truly awesome. I’m writing this as I sit in a rocking chair to keep him asleep, thinking how amazing this is and also the resources that are helping me be a parent.

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APPS

Anyone who’s met me knows I’m a such a sucker for apps and IoT in general. Here are some apps that I swear by when I first becoming a parent.

Contractions App — Smart Contractions Timer

This app is easy to use stopwatch to track your wife’s contractions. The reviews are mixed. But in my experience this app told me to go to hospital…which prompted us to ring the midwife. If we left it any later we would have had a home birth. Just sayin’. Moral of the story…is call the midwife!

Sound Sleeper

A collection of looping sounds, it’s worth upgrading so that you can have continuous play on. My wife and I have grown accustom to the Rain sounds, it is quite soothing for the whole family in the first days of birth.

This works really well with portable Bluetooth Speakers. My wife and I have a couple, one in the bed room and one in the living room. We also take it with us when going out for walks or to the shops.

VacciDate

Get reminders for your child’s vaccination dates.

I don’t care where you stand, vaccinate your god-damn kids, there’s a reason why polio is no longer around people! Rant. Over.

SIDS and Kids safe sleeping

Let’s face it, being responsible for tiny human is overwhelming. Keanu Reeves character (Todd Higgins) in the movie ‘Parenthood’ says it all.

The app is a great resource intended to equip you with information regarding SIDS and will ease your worries about your baby sleeping well.

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CHANGE TABLE KIT

Baby Poop Everywhere

There will be poop everywhere make sure you dedicate a space for changing dirty diapers.

Change Table Mat and Cover

These are a must have, we got two covers just incase you need to wash one and have one handy to use straight away.

Hospital Blueys aka Puppy Training Pads

These work well with your change table mat. It will catch any rogue poos and wees.

Water Wipes & Coconut Oil

My son’s skin was peeling and flakey which is common in new borns. However, my wife and I (both experienced clinicians — not parents) were confused with all the advice that is out there regarding new born baby skin. We got some great advice from one of our midwives during a visit when we asked about managing our son’s skin.

“If you can’t consume it safely, then don’t put it on your baby”

After hearing this, she suggested using putting some coconut oil on a cotton bud and gently applying. We already had water wipes which work really well for cleaning baby bottoms. So, if your child’s skin does get flakey maybe try some coconut oil and no need to go crazy with that stuff.

DIAPER / NAPPY BIN

This. Thing. Is. Awesome.

I’m not going to make this into a discussion on reusable vs disposable diapers. Do what you like, but I have to emphasise that there will be poop everywhere.

Poop Everywhere.

Your sleep pattern will be disturbed constantly and the last thing you or your wife will want to do is wash a dirty diaper. That being said…I highly recommend a diaper bin and refills. It wraps it up tightly, keeping your home from smelling like a pile of dirty diapers. Honestly, the person(s) that built this is an absolute genius.

I know it’s bit random list of things…I hope you find this list useful when becoming a parent for the 1st time.

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If you liked this recommend and share it. I had a great time writing it.
Follow me on Twitter @neilbo21, Blog, AboutMe, LinkedIn.

Why I built the 6MWT App

6 minute walk test App

I used to co-ordinate Chermside Community Centre’s Cardiac Rehab Program and also North Lakes Health Precinct. The program is designed for patients who are recovering from a recent Cardiac event such as Heart Attack or Bypass surgery.

We would conduct this test, which is the Gold Standard across the board, dare I say globally as well.

Once a patient has been accepted into the program we would need to gauge a patients level of fitness. This was done by conducting a Six Minute Walk Test. Basically we get the patient to walk to the best of their ability for six minutes on a flat surface. We would also track their Oxygen and Heart Rate as well.

We would bring out a stopwatch, clipboard that held the forms and a calculator to help us complete this test.

I thought to myself…what a waste of time. We have all these things on our phone! I would go to work then go home to the 21st Century. It was (and still is to this day ) a bit ridiculous. I began to search to see if there was an App that already existed and couldn’t find one out there at all. So I decided to do it myself.

I was always interested in web development and computer programming in my younger years, but chose to do Nursing instead of Information Technology Studies for various reasons.

I started off trying to learn C++, which was the wrong thing and too deep a learning curve to achieve my goals. I remember I used to dabble with Geocities sites and stuff in my younger years so I wanted to go down that path. At the time, building mobile apps was all the rage, but even then the learning curve was steep too.

I messed around with various libraries and frameworks which you can see in this Prezi on How I made it to the App Store. But I eventually built it with jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap (before it was acquired by Adobe and “renamed” to Cordova)

I’m quite proud of what I achieved back then, learning essentially on my own. I managed to get 6MWT app into the App store after a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

I get downloads every week, but not making any real profit from it. It’s not got great reviews, but that’s the whole point. Moral of the story is to just create something and put into the wild. It’s an awesome feeling. You get faster feedback as well and learn what users want. Trust me users will tell you if something is not right.

I’d like to improve the 6MWT App since I’ve learned a lot since obtaining a role as a UI Developer/UX Designer at ThoughtWorks. Although I’ve just become a father for the first time, so I’m not sure when that will be.

Solve small problems first, that’s how you provide value to the world and that’s how you learn to do crazy things like teach yourself how to build an app.

If you liked this recommend and share it. I had a great time writing it.
Follow me on Twitter, AboutMe, LinkedIn.

If you are a Clinician that is interested in 6MWT App, Check it out.

5 Javascript Libraries that make your life easier

Lodash JS & Underscore JS

Lodash is smaller in size and documentation looks better than Underscore. But it is much of muchness when using them. Use these libraries for their helper functions that you can chain together. It makes sorting, filtering and mapping so easy. I’m a big fan of pluck, each, map, assign functions.

Moment JS

Moment JS makes dealing with time and javascript way simpler. You feel like Hiro Nakamura manipulating time and space. It’s easy to compare, calculate and manipulate date and times.

jsPDF & PDFJS

Need I say more?
These two libraries are great for rendering your HTML files as PDF. jsPDF seems to be pretty easy to implement and has some really cool examples. PDFJS is dependent on javascript promises, if you are not familiar with promises I’d either get up to speed or use jsPDF.

 

D3JS

This is the Library you use to render Charts and Graphs. D3JS helps you bind your data so you can visualise it. You’ll have to become familiar with SVG, which can take time to learn but it’s really cool.

Check out these cool examples:

Polymer JS

This a library if you need easy web components. For example if you want to drop a Google Map in your website, you don’t need to do something like this.

You just do it like this. Just give the include Polymer JS and it’s dependencies then just add the google map component and give it some coordinates…Simples!

That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this. I did give you 2 more libraries than promised so feel free to comment below.

Teach yourself how to code without breaking the bank!

I’ve been curious about web and app development for a while now. I switched my career from Cardiac Nursing to UI Developer/UX Designer 2 years ago. If you’re like me, it takes me a while to grasp concepts as I’m a bit of a slow learner. But sometimes the commitment to learn in depth courses can really set you back in the back pocket. So here are some interactive tutorials that won’t set you back while keeping it fun and interactive.

Online Schools

There are so many places to get started for FREE. I highly recommend

Code Academy

I started out with Codecademy, it’s grown a lot since I first started using it. It only used to have basic HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, PHP, Rails…when I first joined. It’s grown immensely and cannot recommend it enough. I was still a nurse and coding in my spare time.

Code School

This is also a great place to start. It’s got really funny videos and instructors. I first learnt AngularJS with this course. I also have more in depth resources on learning AngularJS here. But in all honesty, it’s a got more than just AngularJS tutorials.

Udemy

I’m a bit of an addict to Udemy courses. Pro-tip: wait until they have a sale to buy courses. You can go through the video curriculum, wishlist them for later then buy them when they go on sale.

Khan Academy

Free large courses, not just coding. So sign up to get learning.

Lynda

(Free trial, not so free)

If you live in QLD, sign up to the SLQ website to get free Lynda courses.

TreeHouse

(Free trial, not so free).

Their videos and courses look really good. But I have never tried because of pricing, they do have a free trial. They do have a blog that does come in handy as well.

Free Code Camp

I “met” with Quincy Larson who reached out to me when I was answering questions on Quora a while ago. He’s got an awesome community called Free Code Camp. I’d recommend these courses for absolute beginners, it’s pretty good. Don’t be off put by the number of hours estimated to complete the course. Coding can be hard and it can take time which is why I like Free Code Camp so much…I felt like an idiot when I was trying to learn by myself a few years ago. It took me 9 months to build my first app. I could probably build it in 1 week now that I have more experience. I wish this was around then to help me out.

I’ve signed up just to learn the Backend Javascript.

Disclaimer: I did not get anything for mentioning this, Quincy and Free Code Camp are awesome.

HTML CSS

(client side / front-end )

Is essential in web development. HTML is your mark up that structure your website or web app. CSS makes it interactive and look pretty. Think of HTML as your bones, and CSS as the meat on that bone.

Basic HTML & CSS courses (FREE at the time of posting this blog…hopefully still free):

CSS Diner: Fun and interactive way of learning CSS

CSS Diner

CodeSchool:

HTML CSS Path

Learn Web Development

Udemy:

HTML Workshop

Learn HTML5 from scratch

HTML and CSS for beginners crash course

Javascript

(client side / front-end, except for Node.js)

Javascript is a browser language…it’s the most versatile language and gaining momentum as it has so many frameworks, libraries etc. If you’ve heard of AngularJS, ReactJS, EmberJS, BackboneJS, KnockoutJS, jQuery, Typescript, CoffeeScript…these are all built on top of Javascript. A special mention to Node.js of course as this is Javascript in the backend (server-side Javascript). Along with HTML and CSS, you can build some pretty interactive and awesome apps and websites.

I’m currently very familiar with Angular JS…although I’d like to try Ember and React. I’ve written another blog post on Helpful JS libraries for any project.

Ruby on Rails

(server side / back-end language)

Ruby is a great language to get started with development. It’s been made popular by packaging it up in the Rails framework. Google Ruby on Rails tutorials to get started there are plenty around for you to dip your toes into. You’d be surprised how easy it is build something of value with ease. So just to clarify again Ruby is a language, Rails is a framework built on top of Ruby to get started…seriously if you want to dip your toes into development try Ruby on Rails.

Try Ruby here

Rails for Zombies

http://railscasts.com/

Clojure

(server side / back-end language)

I’m not familiar with Clj (Clojure) but found some great resources.

http://www.tryclj.com/

http://clojurekoans.com/

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/clojure/

Python

(server side / back-end language)

I’m not familiar with Python but found some great resources. Python seems pretty similar to Ruby syntax to me but here’s a tutorial to see for yourself.

http://www.learnpython.org/

Git

(is a version control tool)

Version control is probably one of the hardest concepts to grasp as a self-taught coder. Luckily there are some great tutorials out there that are interactive. If you want to become a developer of any kind you need to learn git. Although there are apps for git such as SourceTree and GitHub Desktop to help you out, I’d recommend learning Command-Line Tools version of git as it is very fast to learn.  (I’ll be posting more on git in another blog post).

Code School’s try Git course

Atlassian has a great interactive tutorial

a more in-depth tutorial by Atlassian

Once you get familiar with git create yourself a GitHub account and a BitBucket account.
I recommend a bitbucket account for free private repositories but definitely first create your Github account to link to.

Youtube

Free videos that you can search how to get started with coding. It’s incredible what you will find on here to get started. It can be a bit scattered, but there are some gems in there that people have taken the time to make good tutorials so invest some time and pop those headphones on to get going.

Stackoverflow

Stackoverflow is the developer forum for all your needs. It’s likely when you first start coding that someone else has run into the same problem. Stackoverflow is your friend, rather the awesome people that contribute to this awesome community are your friends. So if in doubt Google it but also Stackoverflow it.

Vim

(a text Editor on steroids)

I know a lot of Developers swear by Vim, I’m unfamiliar with it as I use Sublime. (I have post coming soon on my favourite IDE’s)

What Is Vim?

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

Despite what the above comic suggests, Vim can be configured to work in a very simple (Notepad-like) way, called evim or Easy Vim.

What Vim Is Not?

Vim isn’t an editor designed to hold its users’ hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn’t a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn’t there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents. (It is great for editing TeX, though.)

http://vim-adventures.com/

http://www.openvim.com/

Overall, this post is supposed to give you a range of ways to learn how to code for free. I hope you find what you like and what you don’t like so that you get a taste of coding. I still love it. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing this.

So there you have it…if you have your own suggestions to add please comment below!

How to start designing without designing.

I’m a Noob in the UX space. I’m usually a Front-end Developer collaborating with Designers and Developers writing HTML, CSS, Javascript. There’s recently been an opportunity at work to try UX so I decided to attend the UX Conference, this year in Brisbane.

I was introduced to this method at a workshop run by UX Mastery. It’s based off something that some awesome dude used at BaseCamp/37 signals. I even managed to find an article by them here

It’s called Writing out your UI Flows. It’s quite simple but so effective. You write What the users sees on the top and then What the user does on one
post-it note then rinse and repeat.

UI Flow Template

I find this so helpful to clarify the design problem of what you are trying to solve. I’ve used this UX workshops when you have Subject Matter Experts, Stakeholders, Business Analysts in a room to help them express how they see their problem being solved. The post-its help as you can re-arrange and adjust certain steps of the flow. This opens up the discussion and helps people to re-think how things can be differently.

It also helps to see where certain steps live so when it comes to Wireframing you can see where things belong. Just to emphasise that each post-it note is not a screen, rather a step in the flow. You can see this in the example below of a RSVP flow. The RSVP Screen has different actions the user can do on that screen and each action can lead to different screens.

So if you don’t know where to start with your design. Start here.
Writing UI Flows down have helped me step back from implementing a solution straight away and to rather solve the problem at hand.

Building web apps with Rails4 and AngularJS in 15 minutes

An approach for Angular and Rails CRUD

Josh Software

While learning AngularJS to make a single page app using Rails4, I found some good videos and blogs. However, I did not find any simple example for CRUD operations that made me easily understand the integration between Rails4 and AngularJS. So in this tutorial post, I explain how to create basic CRUD operation using Rails4 and AngularJS.

Here is my git repository for the complete code Github

Create rails project

Create User model

file db/migrate/[timestamp]_create_users.rb

app/model/user.rb

Create Users controller

Create the CRUD operation in users controller and send JSON response. The code sample is here

Add angular gem

In Gemfile add these two gems.

Setup layout

Adding ng-app and ng-view indicates that we have an AngularJS app in the page.

Create an angular controller

First let’s create a directory for our controllers. You can name it whatever you want.

Now create users_controllers.js file. Here I have used the same naming…

View original post 329 more words

So you want to learn AngularJS

Be an Angular Master

I found starting Angular a bit difficult as I’ve come from a jQuery/Javascript Front-end background. I’m no expert even now, but I’ve certainly come a long way since I started. The Angular way is a bit different and just knowing principles of MVC Framework learning curve can be quite steep. My aim for this post is to save you some time and get you to take the leap to start learning AngularJS.

Disclaimer: NO CODE SNIPPETS THIS POST. I couldn’t do justice with these great resources available outlined below.

1. Start with Code School FREE Course

If you are looking for a place to start I recommend Code School’s Angular Course. It’s a fun course that you can follow quite easily. It involves some quirky videos as all codeschool flavoured tutorials do, but I found this such a great place to start.
https://www.codeschool.com/courses/shaping-up-with-angular-js

2. Setup an Angular and Bootstrap project with Yeoman

I only found Yeoman a month ago and it changed my life! Don’t let the Terminal setup put you off. The Yeoman Terminal Wizard structures your app with ease! It goes further to teach you how to do a “to-do app”. If your feeling keen, setup Yeoman project with Bootstrap and follow the Code School Tutorial. You’ll also never have to refresh your Browser with the livereload integration!!!
Hint: To Edit HTML use the main.html (View) and main.js (Controller)
Yeoman.io – makes Terminal less frightening
http://yeoman.io/codelab.html
I prefer setting up Yeoman with SASS, Compass, Bootstrap Version of SASS. So that I don’t diverge from the original intent of this post…You’ll have to wait for post on why I love SASS/SCSS. It’s also worth mentioning that Yeoman also sets up your project for TDD.

3. Egghead.io Tutorials

John Lindquist’s Egghead.io is also a great place to start Angular JS learning. His egghead.io site is filled with other tutorials in addition to Angular JS.
Egghead.io Tutorials:
https://egghead.io/articles/new-to-angularjs-start-learning-here

4. ng-book

Ng-book …great book to follow: I haven’t finished this book yet but it’s great at explaining how angular works. Once you get more familiar with Angular this book is a great reference. I recommend following this book along with a fresh Yeoman project.
If you want awesome code samples here’s github repo. Here’s the book on Amazon

5. ng-europe conference: October 22nd-23rd, 2014

Not really a physical resource as such, but worth mentioning non-the-less! If you have the opportunity I think this would be an amazing event to sign up for. I wish I was going.
ng-europe

Some Key Concepts to learn…

• Model-View, View-Model: ng-view, ng-controller
• scope: $scope, ng-model, two-way-binding
• routing & templating: $routeProvider, $location
• built-in filters that come with angular: orderby, date, currency, uppercase, lowercase
• built-in directives that come with angular: ng-show, ng-hide, ng-repeat, ng-class, ng-click

The future of Angular

This is just a slide that I found while surfing the web. It’s an exciting insight into the future for Angular.

So hopefully this helps you get started with Angular JS! Good luck and Happy Coding. If you can suggest any other resources feel free to comment.

What the hell is Pizza Mogul?

Since my last post I’d just started working on Pizza Mogul for Domino’s. To answer the question above…Pizza Mogul is great concept by Domino’s Pizza Enterprises so that anyone in Australia can sign up, create your own pizzas (using Dominos Toppings), and sell them to earn Virtual Money (like BitCoins) known as Mogul Dough (pun intended). Mogul Dough can be cashed out into your own bank account! So you can earn a slice of the profit. It’s pretty rad, I recommend signing up…It’s Free and fun.

Working on this project was insane (in good way)! The sheer scale and size of the project was massive, by the time I had rolled on the project there were about 40 ThoughtWorkers still currently working on this thing…and many more who had come and gone. We had Teams in our ChengDu, Perth, Sydney and Brisbane Offices.

Assigning features to each of the TW Offices and the use of Microservices were allowed us to work productively and help the delivery of this product. Having that many ThoughtWorkers on a project is kind of unheard of…It opened up the opportunity to pair with lots of different people Devs, X.D.’s, QA’s, BA’s internally and also got to collaborate with Legal and Marketing Teams on the client side; meet a lot of people from ThoughtWorks on a global scale; challenged me to learn a whole suit of tools AngularJS, KnockoutJS, SCSS, Git Command Line, Bourbon Neat; It was a great project to learn how to write tests (TDD), learn Design Principles, Agile Delivery, Stakeholder Management and Consultancy skills. I can imagine the integration would have been challenging to say the least, I myself can’t fathom what that would have been like.

I mainly worked as part of the design team heavily involved with the Front-end development using AngularJS and SCSS, there was also a big responsibility for maintaining accessibility. We used CodeSniffer a great tool for helping with maintaining this and also writing end-to-end tests for accessibility for our views. It really brought my attention to the importance of this and I realised that I need to apply this to my projects. The cross-browser and cross device testing was pretty damn thorough, I recall feelings of frustration related to IE, Firefox, and devices that run on Android 4.2.2.

Cross Device Testing+++

My workspace….Got Screens?!

A highlight in this project was when I presented my first interactive draft of the treaded tax questions page and charity workflow on an iPhone to the marketing team. Tax questions aren’t sexy and trying to make the process as painless as possible was a really big challenge given the legal implications that had to be made explicit to the user.

The marketing team were excited to see this and were impressed with the animations, overall flow and solution. One of the marketing team members even went so far to mention that he wanted to show the CEO of Dominos! I was chuffed! I remember thinking to myself…If I can make tax questions bearable then my job is done!

Don’t get me wrong there were many days when I felt out of my depth, pressured and stressed. To keep my sanity on those days I asked myself if anyone had died because the build had broken, or something that was meant to be simple to implement wasn’t. Somedays you felt like say “Hey we’re not curing cancer here, so take a chill pill.”

Overall, it was an intense learning experience and due to the length of the project I am now able to draw on those experiences good and bad to help me make decisions on future projects. Since leaving the project, I’ve become an Angular JS and SCSS addict, Mobile First Design fan boy, more confident with Git Command Line although I still love BitBucket’s SourceTree App.

Life After TWU: No rest for the wicked

How time flies. It’s been that long since I left India that another TWU batch have already gone through the same process! You read correctly…TWU 36 has already finished their time in India. I can’t wait to meet some the recruits. I arrived back in Brisbane on a Sunday night only to start work the next day. I was un-assigned for time being unsure about what was next for me. That Friday I got told that I would be on a project in Sydney! I was excited, nervous and a bit sad all at the same time. I was excited about the opportunity that was lying ahead, scared shitless about the opportunity…am I ready to be on a real project. I was sad that I would have to leave Brisbane again for a number of weeks, I had only just come back from India after 5 weeks only to tell my dear wife that I would be absent again for another 6.

I arrived in Sydney a bit jet lagged (you lose an hour due to day light savings), to meet with senior dev, my dev pair and the client. We basically had a discussion around what we were going to deliver by the end of six weeks. We had 4 epic stories, most of which I had no idea what this entailed. We broke down these 4 stories in smaller cards on a wall.
Looking at this wall of work made me feel sick. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to do this…we basically had to extend an existing web app to become a social recruiting tool similar to LinkedIn. Next we spent the next 2 weeks or so digging through the current tech stack. The tech stack involved a backend Salesforce, a local database, this would talk to Java Controllers then on the front end would be viewed as Backbone.js tempates combined soy templates using the Twitter Bootstrap framework. To my surprise this was a very similar tech stack to the project simulation that I had worked on in India for TWU.
I was able to draw on some knowledge that I had learned in TWU, even reuse some code. So I started with what I knew making designing new pagees/views on the front end and designing these features. I had a lot of control over this which as great but always asking my dev pair and client for feedback. There was a lot of trust within the team which really made the project fun. Don’t get me wrong I asked a lot of stupid questions to my dev pair, I felt sorry for her some days as I felt that sometimes I was a slowing us down. But this was not the case, the more I asked the more I learned, and as a result knowledge then shared across the team. This is really important, as it could slow down the productivity if one of us got sick then the project would be at halt. Before we knew it, time was creeping up on us, but we managed to deliver what we set out to build six weeks before.

The beauty of having only 2 devs, was that we could work on different parts of the project to avoid merge code conflicts when pushing to the main repository. We ended up pushing to prod the last day just before easter, half an hour before I had to leave for the airport. I was so proud that we pulled it off, sure there could be some improvements but the web app had significantly improved because of what we achieved.

It was a great sign, when the client asked for more features. Unfortunately, I was due to join another project. I spent the last day of the project working remotely in Brisbane to fix bugs and also documentation. The next day I was due to start on a new project to my wife’s relief in Brisbane. I’m now part of the design team working on a super secret project for Dominos Pizza. All I can say is that I’m learning a heap from talent team at ThoughtWorks about big projects, deadlines, SCSS and Angular JS.

Life at TWU: AW35OME

Spending our free weekend in India at Taj Mahal

Since my last post it’s been a crazy ride. I was exposed to the world of TWU101 Training which exposed me to JAVA, TDD, and comprehending a lot of Social and Economic Justice Concepts such as Imperialism. I was so stressed trying to grasp these concepts by myself at home. I emailed my mentor who kindly helped me out with Java and TDD on a weekend day for 4 hours. My brain was absolutely fried. I was able to write some simple tests afterwards but learning TDD and Java at the same time is a challenge to say the least. I felt more comfortable as the course went on as it involved more Javascript, also learning basic SQL took me back to high school which was fun. As TW graduates in Brisbane we spent most of our time working on course work, at a client site. This made it awkward asking for help at times since our mentors were busy working and from a client perspective we didn’t want be distracting our mentors from their work. But I was glad I could ask for help when I needed it as the alternative is sitting in an empty as everyone is on a client site.

After the initial TW101 course, it was off to Sydney for induction for three days (sometimes called on boarding). The accommodation was quite close to the office and very nice. This was a great experience, I finally was face to face with people who interviewed me, other grads who were all on the same boat and my recruiter who I had only had online contact with. We went through the orientation of the company and the people presenting on different topics (sales, marketing, finance, recruiting, info-sec) were all to eager to answer questions for us all. It was our first exposure to Timesheets, Expenses, and other day-to-day inner workings of being a consultant at ThoughtWorks.
The things that surprised me, were that I was able to help others when starting out…I was able to guide people through a Mac, passing on my learnings of encrypting a Mac and show others some cool apps that are useful from the Mac Store. Being in Sydney also allowed the opportunity to meet grads from the previous batches and pick their brains about TWU in India. At the time it was also my wife’s birthday so she flew down and we had dinner at the Sydney Opera House, it was great to celebrate with her.

So on the third day we left for India, it was a long 24 hours of travelling. For the most part it was quite pleasant, the most unpleasant experience was waiting in Mumbai for 6 hours, boarding the plane then sitting there for an hour, to realise that the flight would only take 20 mins. It was kind of hilarious, watching the other grads fall asleep only to be woken up a few minutes later as we had landed. I got to know more about the other grads, sometimes exposing my insecurities about attending TWU. But I was rest assured that we were all learning and in the same boat which made me feel a whole lot better.

After all the travelling was over and we finally made it to Pune (Poona), I spent the night catching up on sleep. The first people I met were from the North America Region. To my surprise I met a great guy who made the change from finishing Grad School in Medical Research who also spent sometime in Med School. This was refreshing and we talked about having our own startups one day and also contributing to Health Projects such as OpenMRS a Medical Records System that is Open Source. I could go on about each an every person that I had the pleasure of meeting and collaborating with, but this blog would end up so long. But my point here is that I met many different people from all walks of life (North America, Canada, Brazil, China, Africa, Europe and UK regions), people who not necessarily studied computer science, people from all sorts of backgrounds. The traits we had in common that brought us together were that each of us are passionate, hard working and open to learning new things.
It was refreshing to see that we all got along so well, a testament to ThoughtWorks’ recruiting processes.

Our TWU Batch 35 Logo

We were then given assignments that touched on each of the 3 pillars of ThoughtWorks. Balancing project simulation (which was the majority of the time spent), Pillar 3 assignments along with Pecha Kuchas was a task and half to say the least. I learned so much from other fellow grads who took the time to proactively teach us all sorts of technical and non-technical concepts at lunch and learns. After these “lunch and learns”, I wasn’t so hesitant to try new technical things (in nursing Lunch and Learn concept is very similar to the “See one – Do one – Teach one concept”). I only wish I had the smarts and time management skills to organise one myself. Still feeling like a fish out of water now, I guess I wouldn’t know what to teach and L&L sessions.

As a TWU attendee you are living, working and hanging out with everyone… this constant contact with all these amazing people makes it difficult not to get attached. Nothing can prepare you for ThoughtWorks University, you just have to take it as it comes and go with the flow. Asking for help and seeking clarification is one the most important things I learnt that I needed to do. TWU is an experience unlike any other, I’m so glad to have been a part of it. For those of you in the pipeline for ThoughtWorks University, my advice is absorb as much as you can by asking lots of silly questions, ask for help and have fun.