My Crio Winter of Doing Experience

“I’m a Machine Learning enthusiast”. This is how I described myself when asked. Not that I detested other domains of technology, but I just never had the chance or tenacity to explore them; be it the vast and fascinating world of Web Development, Android Development, Virtual Reality or say, Game Development. The pages upon pages of documentation or hours long video tutorials showing others building a website or app, expecting me to blindly copy the code, hardly making sense to me, robbed me of even the little motivation which I sometimes mustered to begin on a new path.

Then, one fine day, I stumbled across the Crio Winter of Doing Externship opportunity. What caught my attention was that at no place did it boast of “Live interactive sessions” or “Extensive learning resources” and a tiny voice inside me said that this journey won’t be like any other.

Skeptical as I was of facing another disappointment, I still decided to give it a shot and then, there was no looking back.

Unlike most tutorials, I wasn’t expected to dive right into lines upon lines of HTML/CSS code, rather, I was first made to understand and become familiar with the tools and technologies revolving around development like Linux, Git, REST APIs, Deployment on Cloud and HTTP. With each module, the Crio team stuck to their commitment of making us “Learn by Doing”. Well, what can be a better way to learn about Deployment on Cloud by actually deploying an app on AWS? Each topic had it’s own dedicated chapter or, as they are correctly termed, a “Micro-Experience”. No lengthy theory but a short video and to-the-point concepts were followed by guided tasks to not only learn, but also explore each technology.

Next, equipped with all above tools, did I take my first step into Web development and that too to work on my own personalized portfolio website! HTML/CSS and JavaScript were instilled with practice coding tasks and Netlify and Heroku were introduced for frontend and backend deployment. All this while, understanding the complex codebase of the project and seeing the changes being reflected on the website in real-time. In the end, I have a beautiful portfolio here.

In the end, I’d just say that I am forever grateful for my experience to join Crio Winter of Doing. It was truly an experience like no other.