C# Basics for Beginners: Learn C# Fundamentals by Coding
As I was the second year group that was graded with the new structures (numbers), I've included a key below to show how my grades map to the old school grades.
G.C.S.E.
Data obtained from Ofqual Blog.
I went to college at New College Stamford to do a two year BTEC Extended Diploma course called Computing Level 3. I achieved the grade Merit, Merit, Merit (MMM).
During College I had to do multiple Units to complete the course. these Units were:
One of my faveourite units was Unit 4: Software Design and Development Project. During this unit I had to create a flowchart, pseudocode and a test plan for a given scenario. I then had to create the program for the scenario and also test the program as I was making it to fill in my test plan. After this I also had to evaluate the program overall, talk about if I had met the client requirements, how I could improve it etc. This was one of my favourite units that I got to do at college as it heavily involved programming which I enjoy so much that doing this unit was so much fun for me to do. However, due to Covid the exam was cancelled.
I also really enjoyed Unit 14: Computer Games Development. During this Unit I had to complete two assignments, the first one being about the development of computer games, how emerging technology has effected how games are developed. What they look like now compared to what they look like back when they first came out and also look at social trends. The second assignment asked me to design, develop and evaluate a game to meet client requirements. This was an extremely fun assignment for me to complete as I got to make a game which I had already been doing in my space time using Unity, so this assignment gave me the chance to test my skills in game development.
I have completed a Udemy course called: C# Basics for Beginners: Learn C# Fundamentals by Coding.
I have completed a Udemy course called: Complete Flexbox Course: Master CSS3 Flexbox for Good.
I have completed a Udemy course called: C# Intermediate: classes, Interfaces and OOP.
I have completed a Udemy course called: JavaScript Basics for Beginners.
My time at UCAS was spent learning lots of different technical skills that helped me not only complete my level 4 apprenticeshipe, but also become a valued member of a development team. My day to day was learning new things while completing story tickets/tasks in sprints. these tasks varied from refactorying old code, updating database stored procedures, creating new functionality and testing it with unit tests and many other things As my knowledge of being a software engineer was very limited at the time, I took the time to complete online courses that helped me improve my knowledge and skills such as C# courses, learning AWS, Splunkdashboards, Linq, Regex, Unit tests and many others.
My responsibilities for this apprenticeshipe was to My role as software engineer would be to develop and maintain software that will be used in the
whole UCAS platform and to also provide support for our products. Along with the day to day tasks that I completed inside sprints, I also completed a protfolio that
had everything I did throughout my time at UCAS where I explained the challenges I had and how I overcame them.
After I had finished the portfolio, I had to complete a EPA (end point assessment) which had me complete two challenging tasks that used the skills
I acuired throughout the apprenticeship. The tasks I had been given was to refactor the current method of matching forenames from requests to forenames in the database.
For this task I used skills such as LINQ and regex to refactor the method into a less conviluted solution.
The other task I had was to create unit and regression tests that covered all the statuses of one of our products. This task required me to learn how to use postman,
how to write regressoion tests and creating dummy data to test against.
For my level 3 computing college course I had to do a week of work experience. I did this week at ADP again but this time I worked with the networking team as I wanted to experience other areas of how a technical organisation runs their day to day operations. During this week I had the opportunity to work inside the server room, doing a daily checkup on the servers to ensure they were running properly. I also installed and configured a new laptop that would be used by one of the employees at ADP. During my time there I also got to look at the hardware components inside servers which later inspired me to construct my own gaming PC at home.
My 2 weeks work experience was based at a company called ADP which is a payroll software development company. During my time I was learning C#, how the software is built and deployed across numerous test environments and insight into how a UX Team functions. I attended 4 Team meetings and gained exposure to a fast-paced office environment. Initially the Application Developer provided an overview of Selenium, a testing software tool that is used to test the payroll product. I created and executed numerous automated tests using the Selenium framework which identified a bug within someone's code. If I encountered issues, I investigated them, then discussed with the development team. Towards the end of my work experience I completed numerous on-line courses that covered basic C# fundamentals. As a result of this I was able to create a prototype Platform game (Win forms) to demonstrate the skills I had gained.
