Week 2 of the CenterCentre fellowship was a rollercoaster of information. The speed at which I am learning new systems and processes is blowing my mind.
I quickly got a handle on the marketing emails that are supposed to be the majority of my job in the first three months of this fellowship. I’m to prepare the documents, code the emails, and schedule them as necessary. This is a fairly straight forward process and requires FSOE (First Set of Eyes) and SSOE (Second Set of Eyes) at a few stages of the process. It’s a tried and true process, and it works well for this company.
In reality, emails were a fraction of my focus this week. Per the senior dev fellow’s suggestion, getting the emails prepared ahead of time frees up my schedule to work on projects and other tasks throughout the week. And, boy, he was right! I spent a couple of hours preparing planned emails for this and the coming weeks. The rest of the time was spent learning as much as I could from the departing dev team lead and trying to ingest as much information as I could.
A Little Front-End
I learned how to deploy landing pages with CloudFlare, GitHub and our CRM.
This week I learned to create a landing page using the CSS framework and designs created by CenterCentre. They have a great resource page that I can use to maintain consistency among our webpages.
To prepare my landing page, I created a funnel in their CRM with my personal domain. Then, using CloudFlare, I created a DNS record to connect my subdomain. Finally, I created my own GitHub repository for this project and attached it to the subdomain in CloudFlare.
Once that was established, I began adding files to my repository. These included the index.html file and the folder housing the styling sheets. After a bit of trial and error, I managed to create a semi-acceptable landing page with Lorem Ipsum text in place of content.
Woo hoo! My first front-end dev project complete! I learned how to deploy landing pages with CloudFlare, GitHub and our CRM.
A Little Back-End
I learned how to backup our WordPress sites on DigitalOcean.
Another project this week included backing up our WordPress sites on DigitalOcean. If you’ve followed along with my journey last year, you’ll recognize that my experience with dev ops and back-end work is limited. I’m the queen of knocking out a quick and dirty front-end project, but I’ve always struggled a bit with the back-end of my projects, including the databases.
For this project, we needed to create a new domain in DigitalOcean and backup our files from our company servers. We even had the documentation from the previous dev fellows who successfully completed this on one of the sites. Sounds simple, right?
Well, as every developer knows, some things don’t go as planned. The senior fellow and I struggled at nearly every step. But this trial and error was extremely helpful in teaching us the process of this move. By the end of today, we managed to set up the new domain and it works seamlessly. It was a real effort over two or three days, but I feel like I know this process in and out.
Next week, I plan on filming some Loom videos to document this process for the next dev fellows. It will be my first major contribution to the documentation and my first chance to create videos through Loom.
A Little Fun
As my dev team lead’s last day is today and our company is growing smaller, I proposed that a voluntary daily Zoom Coffee Meeting might be a great way for the fellows at our company to get to know each other.
One of the best parts of my day at CenterCentre has been the Zoom Coffee Meetings with my dev team lead and the senior dev fellow. We talked about anything and everything, and I learned a great deal about my team. Mostly, we talked about topics other than our jobs, but we would occasionally venture into topics about work or projects we were focusing on that day.
In our company, we have both Marketing and Dev Fellows. In total, we have six fellows that spend much of the day communicating through Slack, email, and Zoom meetings. As a person who has experience in both virtual and in-person work settings, I know the importance of building strong relationships with co-workers. In an in-person setting, these relationships develop naturally, usually through lunch dates or in the break room between meetings. Virtually, that gets a little more difficult.
Luckily, my dev team lead agreed with my proposal and advocated for us to have the opportunity for Zoom Coffee Meetings. The bosses agreed and we had our first Zoom Coffee yesterday! And our second today! Getting to know the marketing fellows has been a treat and I’m looking forward to our daily casual chats in the future. As the fellows move on to new adventures and new fellows come in, we can have a safe place to meet and share our hopes, goals, and dreams, and to talk through some of the issues we face individually and as a team.
To wrap up this week, I have a host of notes and tasks I need to add to my FreeForm app. Next week, I hope to share with you what that workspace looks like and how I’m using it to add to my Career Management Document. Until then, happy St. Patrick’s Day and have a great weekend!
Tina Collier 