In October and November of this year, we proudly hosted the fourth annual Etnetera Mobile Academy, an event that continues to push the boundaries of mobile app development education. This year's program featured workshops focused on iOS and Android development, providing students with practical, hands-on experience. But that’s not all - this year, for the first time, both faculties saw innovations that are driving the world of mobile development.
Personal approach is the key
When selecting students, we focus not only on basic programming knowledge, but also on the mutual chemistry important for fitting into our team. We spend a lot of time together - two whole months - and the candidate has to suit us in terms of personality. This year, thirteen students from different parts of the Czech Republic successfully passed the selection process and the final interview for the iOS faculty.
The Academy was held, except for one workshop, in the online world. How is it different from other available online courses? We take a very personal approach - some students manage their tasks without any problems, while others need occasional consultation. To do this, our team of experienced mentors are available to help anyone in writing on Slack or via video chat. The number of course participants is limited to guarantee a quality individual approach to each person.
Proven concept in a new packaging
The Academy is divided into six workshops over two months. Each workshop, held once a week, contains material that the student must then incorporate into their project during the week. At the beginning of the academy, the participant has a clean project and at the end of the academy, a full-fledged app that interacts with the REST API.
Compared to last year, we have transformed the iOS workshops into the world of declarative programming. Over the course of the year, we have been honing our skills with the SwiftUI UI framework and the Combine reactive library in Etnetera Flow, so it was only natural to pass on that experience to the students. The participants built the app on the principles of Clean Architecture with elements of Screaming Architecture to make the project well organised for both them and the mentors during code review.
Programming alone is not enough
In the academy, we aim to bring students as close as possible to the reality of mobile development. Those who are in this field know that it's not just about programming. A developer must be able to communicate with colleagues, accept constructive criticism or, on the contrary, give suggestions for improvement in the form of code review. The participants could try all of the above on their own. Each submitted assignment was subject to code review by the mentors, and to ensure that the review was not just one-sided, at one of the workshops the students were given their colleague's code to review.
Also, the development could not work without proper project management. Agile project management was introduced to the students by our agile experts during an onsite workshop in our Prague offices. The participants not only had the opportunity to get to know each other personally, but also to get acquainted with the basic ideas and principles of software development and to try working in a team during the Agile Paper Airplanes activity.
Welcome to mobile developers!
The academy works. We have seen this in previous years and this year we have confirmed it. Over the course of four years, we have prepared 44 developers (now in many cases senior) for the career of a mobile developer. In addition, this year we met three graduates of the previous Academy in the role of mentors.
Obtaining a certificate of completion of the Etnetera Mobile Academy is subject to several rules and requires, in addition to completing tasks by the deadline, effort and interest in the field, willingness to learn and work individually and in a team. In this year's academy, five students out of a total of thirteen participants met these criteria at the iOS platform faculty and received the certificate.
Finally, I would like to thank all students and mentors for their maximum commitment and patience. We had a great time during our six weeks together. I'm excited about the prospect of working on an interesting project with some of the graduates, and I'm optimistic that we'll have the opportunity to meet in person once again in the future. I'm looking forward to the collaboration!
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