My learning experience at Crio Winter of Doing

In this post, I would be sharing my experience at the Tech Externship program named Crio Winter of Doing.

Crio is a developer-friendly learning platform that focuses on learning by doing making them a unique organization in the EdTech domain.

What the heck is a Tech Externship? 🙋

Tech externships are experiential learning opportunities, similar to internships, but shorter and part-time, provided in partnership with tech companies. Crio Winter of Doing externships are a great opportunity for you to solve real-world problems in an actual tech startup setting, and learn key skills that will help you advance your dev career.

A bit about my background

Talking about my background might sound unnecessary but trust me it will give you a better perspective about this experience and why it is one of those programs every up and coming Developer should be looking forward to.

Hi! My name is Rajat. I am a final year engineering undergraduate and a Full Stack Developer(not really, more of a backend guy 😛). I am someone whom you would not consider an absolute beginner to programming and development 👨‍💻 and for proof of concept you can check here

That being said I can definitely point out some of the more interesting stuff during this learning experience which would have been hard to identify if I were at the start of my dev journey.

Note: The program is divided into 3 stages, I am going to share the experience of stage 1 for now. This stage is more of a warm-up round in which you learn about concepts like HTTP, REST, Linux Basics, App Deployment in AWS, and Git.

Enough of the boring talk, now let’s get started with the real stuff.

Source: Tenor

Learning about HTTP

What I thought I would learn?

Get to learn the basics of HTTP and a little something about requests.

What I actually ended up doing and learning….

Learn about http by using Dev Tools

No boring definitions on requests, get hands-on with requests and understanding response headers and request payloads

Composing an HTTP request over TCP, Got to the bottom of understanding TCP (Cool stuff right 😎)

Learning about REST

What I thought I would learn?

learn that REST stands for Representational State Transfer (we all expect this don’t we 😂), How GET has request parameters visible and POST does not (this one too 😅)

What I actually ended up doing and learning….

How REST requests happen all the time.

Dissecting REST in the browser

Building and making requests to REST APIs using Java and Python (BTW I know how you are thinking that Python 🐍 is so cool, so less code to write 🤨)

Making a Linkedin POST through Terminal using Linkedin’s REST API, Pretty cool I know!

Learning Linux

What I thought I would learn?

Do a bunch of basic commands like cd, ls, mkdir, rmdir, rm, rm -rf, etc.

P.S. did all of this too, but early on

What I actually ended up doing and learning….

Piping and Redirection

OpenSSH Log analysis using the command line (Full Hacker feels 👨‍💻) Check the script here 👈

Learning about AWS

What I thought I would learn?

Create an AWS account, create an EC2 instance.

What I actually ended up doing and learning….

SSH into the EC2 instance

Setting up and running QEats app using Docker🐳 (Yeah Docker, you heard it right! 😇)

Accessing the App Server from the Android App

Learning GIT

What I thought I would learn?

Create a Github repository, adding a Readme file with the commit message “Add Readme” (C’mon we all did this 😂)

What I actually ended up doing and learning….

Creating a Merge Conflict

Handling Merge Conflict

Using git log efficiently

You might be thinking that’s it. But….

Source: Tenor

Yes, there is more to Crio Winter of Doing.

BIG VARIABLE SERIES TALK

Chat with the most inspirational Indian entrepreneurs.

Fireside Chat with Mr. Binny Bansal, Co-Founder, Flipkart.

Fireside Chat with Mr. Vivek Ravisankar, Co-Founder and CEO, HackerRank.

HANDS-ON SESSION WITH THE EXPERTS

REST Hands-on Session with Mr. Sridher Jeyachandran, Co-founder, Crio.do

Linux Hands-on Session with Mr. Kiran Suresh, Lead Product Engineer, Crio.do

The Community

For any long-term program, if you have a good community of fellow developers to support you, your life becomes very easy. It has been amazing seeing people pushing hard to complete their tasks and at the same time helping their peers. Anyone part of this community definitely feels lucky 😇

Helping others and getting help is totally divine

When I started I thought about what new can I learn in a basics class. However, Crio’s modules definitely surprised me! Its approach is pretty hands-on and developer-centric. Think of it as reading well-written software documentation which is definitely the developer’s way.

Overall my learning experience has been amazing till now and would definitely suggest you to look out for all future Crio programs.

If you liked this post please show some ❤️ and do not forget to 👏🏻

P.S. This happens to be a part of the #shareyourlearning challenge. The most liked post’s author gets goodies. So yes please help me win. (Yeah I am goody greedy 😏)