As Code Platoon’s summer intern, I’ve been lucky to listen as my platoon-mates talk about their experiences inside and outside of the military. Learning how they stepped up as leaders and completed missions that often make my university projects look like coloring pages.

One of the things I’ve been struck by is how often their stories include recounting the criticism they received from a superior or teammate on their work. The story isn’t told with a tone of embarrassment or bitterness but in the context of what they learned and how they corrected their mistakes. This positive response to feedback is not what I’ve come to expect in a world full of griping about bossy bosses and nit-picky teachers. I believe it is part of what has made my platoon members so strong and adaptable.

But now they face a new challenge – how to take their ability to receive feedback and adapt it to a team environment in software engineering.

To thrive in tech, programmers must not only receive but also offer difficult constructive criticism. For most people, this doesn’t come naturally. While our ability to work in teams is often considered an innate characteristic, something a person either has or doesn’t, collaboration is a skill every programmer can and should develop.

Like almost everything in programming (and in life), the best way to improve is to practice over and over again. Students at Code Platoon work in pairs or small groups on many of their coding challenges and projects during the 14-week program. In the tech world, this is referred to as pair programming. Often “lone-wolves” like myself come to enjoy having a programming partner, but unlike shooting hoops or solving math equations, while we may enjoy pair-programming, it’s hard to know if we’re getting better.

After we engage in collaboration, receiving feedback from our teammates is key to understanding our areas of strength and what we can do to improve. The opportunity to learn and grow into a better team member is a privilege. I am grateful for anyone who has given me feedback, negative or positive, preventing me from making a much bigger mistake somewhere down-the-line and many of Code Platoon’s students feel the same way.

Unfortunately, not all critiques are helpful, and some are just hurtful. To avoid the “hurt” Code Platoon teaches that feedback in a programming team environment should focus on three things – being specific, being actionable, and being kind.

During a weekly meeting, a few students recently commented, while they were happy to receive feedback, they didn’t know what to look for or how to critique their partners. They didn’t want to critique their peers unless they really felt their feedback would help them.

For those students and members of the collaboration heavy tech world, I put together a checklist. I’ve included points to consider for giving productive feedback, drawing on insights from Code Platoon’s instructors, and a wonderful presentation by Kelly Cronin of ThoughtWorks.

When your team or pairing is in an appropriate mindset for offering and receiving feedback, try implementing some of the suggestions. As someone’s collaborator, you are the best judge of what went well or where there are opportunities for improvement. , Creating this open dialogue of feedback allows all team members to improve, ultimately creating a more successful coding challenge or project!

Merrill O’Shaughnessy is one of Code Platoon’s summer interns and a T.A. for the full-stack web development course. She is currently studying computer science and mechanical engineering at Duke University and is interested in UX /UI design. Follow Merrill on LinkedIn or find her on Dribbble.

This is what we’ve been building toward the last twelve weeks. Using Flask, React, and various third party libraries, students team up to create a capstone project that they will use to show off to employers during interviews.

Working in the Real World

Perhaps the most talked about part of Code Platoon is the final group capstone project. This project occurs over 2 weeks at a technology company’s office. The company provides students with work stations, project management support, and mentorship from senior developers. Students participate in the company’s stand up cadence and have access to the office’s amenities. Because they’re building their project alongside seasoned professionals, they’re also creating long-lasting connections within the tech ecosystem of Chicago.

Graduation

Graduation day is also presentation day. After two weeks of intense work, groups present their projects to friends, family and members of the tech community. We work with students to practice their presentations and help them hone their pitch for their new app. After the presentations, students take time to network and answer questions.

Our aim at Code Platoon is to have students graduate with the tools they need to get a junior role in software development. An important landmark on our road toward that goal is the personal project. We recognize that classroom instruction and curated challenges can teach a lot, but there are still lessons that can only be learned by stepping into a unique project where you’ll need to adapt to the challenges that present themselves along the way. That’s why we dedicate an entire week to letting students develop and deploy their own projects.

Build Something Unique

By now students will have all the skills necessary to build their own projects. They’ll have HTML, CSS and JavaScript to help them build a dynamic and responsive User interface and they’ll have the ability to implement data storage with SQL and Flask on the back end. From there we set them free to create whatever they want. In the past, students have built blogs, e-commerce sites, mapping applications, and chat apps. This is a chance for our students to take what we’ve taught them and explore what interests them. Instructors and mentors will be on hand to provide guidance, but students will do the bulk of the work themselves. The goal is that by the end of the week our students will be able to add a whole new project to their resume.

Brag About Your Work

The last day of the week is presentation day. Students present their applications to the class. Building is a great skill, but knowing how to speak intelligently and clearly about what you’ve built is just as important, especially when hunting for a job. Students will get feedback from instructors and peers on their application and presentation skills. In the end, everyone will vote and awards will be given for the best applications.

Continuing with our front-end curriculum from last week, we’ll dig into running JavaScript in the browser. Adding Behavior and Creating a Personal Website using JavaScript allows developers to add behavior to their websites: slideshows, more advanced animation, and reacting to user events like moving the mouse or entering text.

JavaScript and the Browser

The Document Object Model, more commonly referred to as the DOM is how the browser understands your web page. We’ll break down how the browser constructs the DOM, why it’s so important, and how we can use JavaScript to traverse it. Students will use technologies like AJAX  and JQuery as well as newer ES6 features like fetch to make HTTP requests in the background.

Building a Portfolio Site

At Code Platoon, we work to make sure that when our students graduate have all the tools necessary to enter the job market as junior developers, which is why we put heavy emphasis on projects to build their portfolios. We’ll have several of these opportunities throughout the cohort and the personal site / blog is just the first. Students will spend the end of this week utilizing their new found HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills to build and deploy their own personal portfolio site where they will be able to showcase projects and accomplishments as well as host their resumes or any other information they want.

Programming languages come and go. Frameworks come and go. SQL (structured query language) is forever. Students will spend week four learning how to read and write data to Postres, a modern database, using SQL. Students will learn the basics of database design and how to incorporate a database into their app.

Working With a Database

Saving data to a file is fine for small applications that have limited functionality, but most modern web applications use a relational database. We’ll spend all of week four learning the tools and practices that will allow students to interact with data in much more dynamic and complex ways. The first step will be learning how to create and talk to a database. Databases have their own languages for accessing and manipulating the information they hold. By far the most popular, and the one students will focus on throughout their time at Code Platoon, is SQL. Students will learn how to set up a Postgres database from scratch. They’ll work on building out a schema and start to read and write data, all using SQL.

Database Design

The design and structure of a database can have a huge impact on an application’s performance. Databases need to be adaptable, scalable as an application grows, and changeable as new features get added. They also need to be secure. At Code Platoon, we teach all the skills students will need to build a database that is effective and efficient, and we’ll discuss best practices when it comes to how to store sensitive data like passwords and other personal user information. The highlight of this week will be a day-long database workshop hosted by Hashrocket. Hashrocket is a web consultancy in Chicago / Jacksonville Beach known for creating quality software. One of the presenters will be Jake Worth, a US Army veteran-turned-programmer.

ORM

SQL is a powerful tool but it can get tedious to write. Most languages have something called an object relational mapper or ORM. Python’s ORM is called Alchemy. Think of it as a way to talk to your database using the Python programming language. ORMs help developers read and write to the database more quickly and efficiently. They also cut down on code you have to write.

By the end of week four, students will have most of the nuts and bolts necessary to build their own web applications. We’ll spend week five looking at how to structure and style web pages before jumping into our first framework, Django, where all of the pieces from prior weeks will finally come together.