It surprised me how much emphasis there was on human skills when it comes to what employers are looking for in a developer. I had assumed that employers would be looking for technical skills and the best coders and therefore Dev Academy would focus on the technical skills needed to achieve this.
Being honest about who I am and writing and publishing about myself to others. I am quite an introverted person so I found expressing myself in this way to be difficult so I spend too long on my cultural blog posts. But I am trying to work on portraying a more honest version of who I am as I get older.
It seems that with determination anyone is able to become a coder - either through doing a course or teaching themselves. But whether people with the right values are doing the job and for the right reasons is another issue. We have come to a point with technology where we face serious issues with the ethics behind it (e.g. foreign agents actively influencing elections, malware, social media, facial recognition, privacy breaches...) and the effects of technology on our society are continually being questioned as it impinges on our democratic rights and affects our health and wellbeing in a negative way. I feel that tech is moving at a pace where our legislation is unable to adapt to keep up with it and work in a way to keep us safe. We therefore need to have diversity in technology to represent the population and not just people with good technical skills.
No. It has reframed how I feel about learning and my idea of what failure and success is. I also think it's important to explore our values and reasons for wanting to become developers, to explore and develop an awareness of ourselves and our intentions. This model of learning has been very different from the ways that I have studied previously and has shown me that the traditional education model isn't necessarily the best way to do things.