I have just finished the 12-week mentorship program focusing on Native Android app development. I am very satisfied with the experience, I feel like I have been able to take away with me skills and knowledge of the native android framework, as well as a professional-level project that I can share with employers.The 12-week program begins with the project requirements for a calendar application with figma designs and api documentation. Since the API is already built for you, you can focus on building the app. From there, it was open ended to me to decide what and how much to code each day, and I would proceed to submit a pull request to be reviewed 3-5 times a week to receive feedback to revise and work on the next feature I chose. I would say the bulk of the value you are getting is combined in the project preparation and the availability and quality of the reviews in the pull requests. I have done other workshops and courses in the past, and this one is unique in that the mentors do not prescribe a schedule of tasks to do over the 12-week period, nor do they start with any instruction on how-to to build any particular component. I was on my own to figure out what to build, as well as looking up how to accomplish that specific subtask. While a little scary at first, by the middle of the mentorship, I got used to the cycle of picking up the next feature I wanted to build and learning the right way to build it. I would say this in itself is a valuable mindset to gain, that not only gives me confidence as an engineer to take on unknown technologies and features, but has given me a more personal relationship with coding as I am now more comfortable with the practice of exploring whatever topic or technology I choose. I will say that it’s important to allocate enough time to this program. Just as with any engineering project it’s easy to underestimate how much time it takes to build something. I spent about 10-15 hours on the first 8 weeks, and knowing what I wanted to accomplish, increased my time spent to 30-50 hours a week for the last 4 weeks of the program. There is time that needs to be spent not just coding, but looking up different topics to fully understand them as well as understanding issues and refactoring as your project grows.
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Philipp Lackner has over 12 years of experience in the software field. Over the past years, he built a following of over 150,000 native Android developers on social media who trust his work. To make sure, this is not just theoretical school knowledge, he works as a consultant for companies around the globe and assists them with their native Android projects.
He’s happy about every developer’s life he can change to the positive.See more