A STORY TO BE TOLD

Let me start first by introducing myself, I am Bassel and I am currently a Codi apprentice (as I like to call myself).

My experience in tech and software before Codi was all self-taught, I taught myself a lot of stuff and tried to reach my goals on my own. Anyways I realized one day in September 2019 that it was time for me to start applying for internships at software companies and eventually try to get a job. That was the plan, but then again I thought to myself “how much will I learn as an intern? How much will I improve myself from an internship? I guess maybe I can search for an apprenticeship program instead which is focused on my improvement.” With a little bit of DuckDuckGoing (a safer search alternative to Google) I found Codi which was the closest thing to what I wanted, I applied, I got to the interview, I got accepted and that was the beginning of my Codi journey!

I was really nervous for the first day, I wanted to see if it would meet my expectations, and who would’ve guessed that Codi was even more exciting than my expectations (my expectations are really abnormal to be honest)!!!

In the first day we were told about the Prairie phase, this was a period where we were randomly put into teams and our mission was to collect 20k keys collectively as a class to pass the prairie period and get to the more serious period with larger projects afterwards. We gained keys based on the completion of specific tasks and challenges that we were given in teams, pairs or individuals. That period was really challenging and tough. We were nervous about the keys, would we manage to collect 20k keys? We organized ourselves well and had representatives for each team, we wanted to collect those 20k keys! Our biggest fear at that time was “Gaby Key”, when we heard “minus keys, minus keys, minus keys” we knew it was Gaby!! (Gaby is one of our lovely mentors by the way!) Gaby was the monster that took keys from us whenever we did something wrong, like not attending on time (perhaps Samar was even more brutal but she didn’t show it). Eventually we got to those 20k keys just in time and at this time, we also got introduced to our other mentor Omar (one of the most amazing men I have ever met).

The next phase was called the “Fake Client Project”, essentially it was a month of making a full-stack web app with a newly formed team, our mentors acted as our “Fake Clients”, so to my amazing luck I got to be in the “Boss Team” the Trio of Me, Hasan and Michel. Now why were we the “Boss Team”? Simply because our fake client and mentor for this project was none other than Omar himself (The Boss) of course because we are Bosses ourselves too. Let me say Omar as a client was the worst client we could have ever taken, he completely demolished us in the first meeting, everything was going crazy with this client, he was cocky, thinks he knows-it-all type of client.

Overall, it was a really good experience, we failed, tried again and failed again, after that we reached the end of the project and before we presented it we went on a hiking trip to Arsoun. You can see the blog we wrote as a whole Codi team here.

 Now it’s none other than the Financial Project month / Corona month. This month we got quarantined at home, we worked on the project remotely, our mentors and the whole Codi team did their best to provide the best learning experience even if remotely. They kept checking on us, and my lovely awesome colleague Marwa created a new daily trend for us called the daily mental health check in.

I should not forget about my awesome teammate on that project Rania, where we built a financial android app together. It was tough but even through all the hardships we made it through to the end. A huge thanks to my lovely Mentor Samar for helping us get through this as well.

Originally this phase was reserved for the real client project, but due to quarantine we made new adjustments and slid in a new real client WordPress project, I worked on this with my amazing team member Abdel Majeed. It was a good experience working with a real client, we had online meetups with our client, we worked on his website and we made our first satisfied customer in this software journey.

I would like to thank Laura for forcing me to write this blog (this is fun I am going to write more blogs), and hopefully my English mentor Rex approves of my writing in this blog. Also when we get back to Codi, Joseph yes Joseph, the mysterious man behind the desk in Codi (King of Intimidation) we will have our long balcony talks and I will peel off those mystery layers one by one! Love you all and thanks for reading my blog.