Hackademy Mentorships with Latam Campus Experts 🚩

Jul 08, 2024

Git and GitHub, at the core of a career in tech ⚛️💻📝

A few days ago, we had the opportunity to present a series of mentorships with hackademy on topics related to Git and GitHub as part of their software engineering bootcamp, from the basics of creating and managing a local repository, to working with and getting the most out of tools such as GitHub Copilot, GitHub Pages and other products and services offered to all students with the student developer pack 🎒📦. We gave daily workshops for a week with different campus experts from around Latin America: @josefdc, @nquirogac, @DanielaaER, @IgnacioPalma and @BGMP were part of the team in responsible for providing these mentorships.

How did we organize ourselves to develop the content? What obstacles did we face when dealing with introductory topics for people who are starting out in these areas? What were the solutions we put into practice and what can we take away from all this?

Activies Calendar 📅

From a meeting with the organizer of the propaedeutic course, we detected the knowledge that people already had and we looked for the best way to complement them from the basics, as I mentioned before, the program content is for people who are looking to introduce themselves to software development and there is no doubt that Git and GitHub are fundamental tools for all this.

A highly focused team 🫡🏁. Thanks to the diversity of the team and even with the limited time we had, we were able to contribute from different areas of expertise that together enriched the central objective of all this. Each person had clear strengths to share, some of us gave the mentoring in pairs and others shared their talks individually due to scheduling reasons.

Day 📆	Topic	Time ⏰	Mentors
Monday	Git & GitHub	5:00 to 6:30	Daniela Espinosa, Juan Aguilera
Tuesday	Advanced version control	5:00 to 6:00	Natalia Quiroga
Wednesday	GitHub Tools	5:30 to 6:30	Ignacio Palma, Jose Benavente
Thursday	Communities on GitHub	5:30 a 6:30	Natalia Quiroga, Jose Duarte
Friday	Panel	5:00 a 6:00	Everyone 🚩💻!

Each topic complements the previous one. From the basics to understand what a repository is, to start working with Codespaces to have a development environment ready in a matter of seconds and continue putting into practice all of the above.

Tips for teaching the ABCs 🤓

As the title mentions, I am going to share with you a little bit about what I was able to learn and extract from all this great experience and my participation with the basic Git and GitHub theoretical explanations 🤗📂.

Explaining version control can be a very tricky thing 😕 to do when you are not clear where to start, so if you ever find yourself in this situation, I recommend being very clear with everything you say. Be short and to the point with what you share, people are usually not going to want to listen to you talk for an hour about all the theory of git, commits, branches, etc 😴. In my case, it was 20 minutes to explain the basics of what a repository is, even the basic commands when working with a remote repository in GItHub.

Another thing I learned after watching the recording of my participation and that of the other campus experts, was to have a calm pace and space during the mentoring, so that people can identify through various signals in addition to your voice, that you have mastered this topic and that they can trust you. This does not mean that you keep your expressions as neutral as possible, on the contrary, knowing how to increase the tone of voice and combine it with body expressions and tempos, is very important in all talks in my opinion. But we must know how to identify that when we explain a new concept to someone, we must make it seem as easy to understand as possible.

Try to empathize as much as possible with people who are starting from 0 with these topics or have very basic notions, that is the first and essential step for everything else to go well.

PS. Never forget to explain the difference between Git and GitHub 😉!

⬆️⬆️⬆️ I will leave you with this nice slide I prepared for the mentoring (I know it is in Spanish but I still loved how it turned out 😄!).⬆️⬆️⬆️

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We closed the week with a less technical content where we were able to share experiences in the communities and in the world of technology, all in a free space for discussion among the community.

The Hackademy padawans were amazing in all the mentoring!

“And may the code be with you 🌌🚀🚩!” -Fernando from Hackademy