My first week in the ALX SWE program, if I am to summarize how it feels, I will say exciting, the mere thought of what I could potentially achieve with this program has me excited and motivated.
This first week was majorly focused on environment and mentality.
On environment, Shell, Emacs, Vi, and Git were the main focus for the first week as these programs were highlighted as some of the things that make up a software engineer's setup. They are essential tools used in software engineering, a key part of the software engineer's working environment.
Shell is basically a terminal-like window used to receive commands from the engineer and passed to the operating system to execute. The shell mostly only receives commands from the keyboards.
Focus was mostly on knowing what the shell is and navigation around the shell. Since the shell is similar to a terminal this means that there is not any graphic user interface so the use of the mouse is near impossible, so it is important to learn how to navigate the shell with just your keyboard. More on navigating the shell and the commands used to navigate the shell will be discussed in another post.
Vi and Emacs on the other hand are text editors used to read and write texts and code. Vi is usually a native of the shell, this means that it comes with the shell and is the default editor of the shell. To use either one you invoke them with their name in small letters and the file you want to write in or edit.
Just like Shell, vi and emacs also only receive commands from the keyboard and also have a lot of shortkeys used to initiate a command, which will also be discussed in another post.
Although Shell, vi, and emacs were reviewed in week 1, majority of the topics were about the mentality and Alx program and how it works because it’s the onboarding week.
The Slack platform was introduced as well as the intranet which is the web app used to access courses assignments projects and other tasks.
On mentality, I guess I could say the key thing I took away this week was to DO HARD THINGS.
The mentality portion of tasks focused on the right and best mindset that should be used to approach the program. Topics on Grit, growth mindset and fixed mindset were used to express this lesson, with proven research and case studies it was evident that there is indeed a proper mindset that should be used to approach this program.
The mentality portion also covered effective learning techniques that can improve learning assimilating ability which is the Feynman learning technique.
These are some of the lessons that came with the first week of my journey in the Alx software engineering program, join me on this platform as I reflect daily on how I become a software engineer through the Alx software engineering program.