Making our future job easier by teaching the youth

A challenge we face in Praqma is finding the very right people for the job, and we know our customers are on the same difficult mission. So we aim to make the software developers of tomorrow even better.

“I wish this was taught at university”

Having a strong Version Control System, as well as mastering it, should be considered one of the pillars of being a skilled software developer. Thus we set out to teach Git to students at the University of Aarhus. After talking to local student communities (DSAU and SOFA) we put up an event on Facebook. We announced 30 seats, but within a day we had 32 signups, so we increased the amount of seats to 40.

First day comes and we have almost 100% attendance. Wow! - We know how hard it is to sell things for free, and know it is hard to keep a high attendance for free events - but the students really wanted to learn Git.

Most of the students already knew basic Git - only a few did not raise their hand when we asked “Who has made a commit before?”.

“There is no world without Git, Git is everywhere”

We went through everything from Git Internals, basic commits, to how you can create efficient workflows in a real life scenario.

We use the same approach as we do in our CoDe Academy: “Tell-Show-Do” - Anything the students are presented with is followed by an exercise that allows them to internalize the material.

“I forgot I was there to learn”

We were very impressed with the skill level of the students. Everyone got that “Git is basically a persistent DAG”, exercises were done swiftly and we got some very relevant questions. And as a pleasant bonus: We have definitely found a few potential new colleagues.

We believe in an informal atmosphere, where we teach equals and that comes to show in questions like: “What was the link to the evaluation form again?”. The learning experience is a joint effort. We collaborate on the education of the students.

We feel confident in letting these students go back to the University and to their jobs and use Git efficiently. We are proud of the students, and we are proud of the awesome course that we managed to give. Now it is up to Sofus and Jan to do the same thing in Copenhagen.

We will leave you with our new favorite picture: 

Aarhus out!