It’s week 2 and I am really enjoying myself at MA. We have much more “after school” (and week-end!) work than I was expecting and I’m realising now that I was not realistic thinking I would be able to work on my business plan while at Makers. It would be the best way to do both things wrong. Thus I’ve decided to focus on MA for the time being.

Last Friday, we had our first end-of-week challenges. Two short challenges – on command line and GitHub – and a longer Ruby Challenge to finalise over the week-end. I will write more about GitHub in a future post,  but to put it in simple terms, it’s a sort of Dropbox-meet-LinkedIn platform for developers. If you are interested in seeing how it works you can take a look at the code I wrote for the FAAST challenge.

We also had our first retrospective on Friday. All students and coaches sat down in circle and discussed what could be improved at Makers Academy. Topics covered various areas: the course material, student-coaches and student-student interactions, the office environment. After, we had some free beers to help us work on our challenges. I don’t know if we’ll have beers every Friday or if it was because it was the last day of one of the teachers, Alex.

It’s nice to see that people at MA care about what we think and actively request our feedback. I suppose that like any *lean startup*, they have to work continuously on customer development – during the retrospective, Evgeny (MA co-founder) emphasised several times on their willingness to iterate.

And they actually act on it quickly. For example, I asked for coconut water – a first world issue really, and on Monday morning, a bottle of Vita coco was in the fridge. More importantly some students felt we were not given enough notice for the pre-course, relative to the amount of work required (60-80 hours). Having more coach time was another concern. To address these issues, Steve has organised elective “catch-up” sessions over the past two days for those who want to come back on some topics they didn’t have time to cover during the pre-course.

This week, we have to build a battleship game model, and we are working in groups of four or five. I am working with Nicole, Yvette, Andrew and James, and it very interesting to see how people think and view things differently. I feel our group has a good dynamic, which is nice, and we have now built the Ship and Cell classes. More for tomorrow.