WHEN TWO COHORTS COLLIDE!

So this week I was in training for a couple of days. In the old days, this would have been a game of listening and try to stay awake. However after 16 weeks of intensive teaching at CodeClan a couple of days was a breeze.

The training was in the customer experience platform CEP of a product by a company called FirmStep. It goes hand in hand with their Content Management System CMS. You can think of the CMS as the website and the CEP as the application for forms, processes, and workflows for customers visiting the website site.

The guy training (Mathew) had traveled up from Edinburgh for a couple of days. The training was very hands-on and we were quickly creating processes, designing forms, making data, and integrations.

Mathew spotted my cohort 7 sticker proudly displayed on my laptop and queried what it was from. It's the class sticker for my cohort when I studied at CodeClan. It turns out that Mathew is also a CodeClan graduate from cohort 3. He graduated in April 2016 and joined FirmStep.

Small world, or is it a small tech industry? It was really good to chat about our time at CodeClan and how we found the whole experience. I had done a week of Ruby on Rails but Mathew had not. The course must have evolved between cohort 3 and cohort 7. It's cool to think that two completely different businesses or workplaces that have employees that came from the same coding school can help each other out.

Later in the week, I had another short overview on the CMS platform via video call with a guy based in Canada. It all looks very straightforward and not unlike the Jimdo product I use to do my own websites and this blog. The CMS is very much fill in the blanks with your content and the product takes care of all the code and configuration. I guess this is a good thing in terms of speed and reliability. Probably not so good if you like to code.

In other news, the CivTech challenges were published this week. Seven in total (I thought there was to be 8).

There is quite a range in there. Quite a few if not all could be solved by tech and software. I have been mulling them over this week thinking of possible solutions. I will need to see if Udny Solutions can come up with a viable entry. Who knows. It's worth a try. Watch this space...

Oh and news from cohort 7. There have been 2 more of us who have secured jobs (edited actually 3) this week. Both on the same day. That must be the majority of us are now gainfully employed in the tech industry. Well done guys! Hopefully, our paths may cross in the future.

I have been asked by CodeClan to do a blog post for them on my journey over the past year. I will either post it here or provide a link. Depends on what exciting things happen next week.

Thanks again for reading

Oh and below is why I'm not a happy Windows user. My laptop did this yesterday, and this morning it took it upon itself to perform an update without asking me!!!