My Time at Ablestate Creatives Limited

Hey Charles here, I am an aspiring UI/UX designer with the ability to translate designs into the functional front-end. To achieve my goals, I am undertaking the Ablesolver Cohort at Ablestate Creatives Limited, which I was blessed to participate in on a scholarship basis. In this short article, or I at least intended it to be short, I write about my time at Ablestate from the life lessons learnt to the technical skills and tools.

my time at Ablestate

What is Ablestate

Ablestate Creatives Limited is a software company with the aim of “Making technology education fun, accessible & short term”. Ablesolver is one of the courses offered, this course helps you to become a World-Class Web Developer. I joined as a student in late March this year(2021) with a couple of colleagues.

In the past few months at Ablestate, I have gained alot of skills, I have been able to learn the different tools used in the industry.

Soft skills

Documenting: (Do not solve the same problem twice). Since day one we were encouraged to document our learning, work and processes. Documentation encourages knowledge sharing. We shared stuff we had learnt on our social media platforms daily for accountability purposes and also to share with the tech community the knowledge we had gained. Here are the words of our own Coach David Wampamba about self marketing and documenting.

A tweet from coach David

Hard skills

Touch typing: when I joined Ablestate, touch typing wasn’t know to me and to type without having to look at your keyboard seemed like a skill that would require ages of practice. but since day one, We have learnt how to type and in a period of 3 months, I was able to type at a speed of 38wpm and still going faster.

Git and GitHub: Git is a version control system and GitHub is a cloud-based hosting service that lets you manage Git repositories. This was part of the package we learnt in the first few weeks and we we able to use Github’s page feature to host our GitHub pages, charleskasasira.github.io

We have been able to look at many other technical skills Agile development, UI/UX design, Html, CSS, Bootstrap, SQL, Javascript , test-driven development using the Jest library, and currently we are learning Node.js as we are on the journey to become full-stack developers. With weekly assessments to help us grasp the knowledge, and other self reading assessments like SOLID principles, Data structure and algorithms and many more.

And we have been able to use the industry standard tools, we use Figma which is used to make wireframes and mockups. I was able to design my portiofolio from low fidelity wireframes and see it through the development, check it out here.

Github, mysql, trello, codesandbox, the terminal.

Challenges

During the cohort, Uganda faced the second wave of covid-19 and under government measures to fight the virus, we had a lockdown, Though this didn’t stop the team at Ablestate. We conducted online sessions using zoom which are still ongoing.

Ablestate Zoom session

Conclusion

So far (at the time of writing this article) we have covered almost 75% of the Ablesolver Cohort at Ablestate and with the knowledge gained and I am positive that I will be able to design and develop experiences that will make people’s lives simple. Thanks to the team at Ablestate.